Dear PIEN friends,
Beautiful sunny summer day, kind of hot - 87 deg. F.
I am raising the question of what causes Parkinson's
Disease again. I would like to ask all those on the
PIEN list with any comment to please contribute a
message for us to all to think about.
My question is as follows:
THe anti-Parkinsonian drug, Amantadine,
also called Symmetrel, is known to stop or
to reduce PD symptoms. Yet, Amantadine is an
ANTI-VIRAL drug.
Does this mean that we all have a VIRUS in our
central nervous systems that, once lodged there
for years, causes tremor, slowness of movement,
and lowered dopamine transmission from cell to cell?
IN simpler words, is Parkinson's due to a virus?
If this is not true, WHY does Amantadine help? Or,
if Parkinson's Disease does result from a viral attack,
exactly how does Amantadine reduce symptoms of PD??
This line of inquiry leads me to a very important
plea to the scientific world: A huge effort to hold back the AIDS
virus, or HIV, has given us a vast knowledge of how
a "slow virus" like HIV gradually becomes a
lethal virus. If there is a PD virus out there. that
is ALSO a slow virus, does it act in any way like the HIV virus?
Is that a viral model we can use, and is there
a Human Dopamine-deficiency Virus ("HDV")
out there? Is this the PD-causing virus that the Parkinson's patients
in the famous movie, "Awakenings" , all had caught--the
post-world War I infulenza virus?
I would love to discover the cause of and the cure for PD,
and win the Nobel Prize, and attract investors,
and create millions of dollars of research monies
in an Ivan Suzman Foundation for PD research.
I am not Steven Hawking, and I am not financially
in a position to personally fund the research,
being in my 16th hard year of the battle against my
symptoms, but believe me , please when I ask those
of you out there in PIEN-reading cyberspace to
PLEASE look at what I have just said again . i
think it has a great deal of value, and offers hope
for a cure.
Ivan Suzman, PWP
51-39-36
Portland, Maine, USA
"in virology there is an answer for us"
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