 |
 |
I can't help but wonder if they are making this too complicated. Sure, as my PD progresses, I feel more uncomfortable in social situations. I don't thinnk i am reading peoples' emotions wrong, but I worry about getting a dyskinesia attack in public, spilling my food in a restaurant, or freezing in the middle of a crowded street. I have less and less contact with other people, feel more isolated . Maybe this makes communication more difficult when we are around people. like we're out-of-practice? from the article: "People with Parkinson’s disease often can’t differentiate between a sweet smile or an angry grimace, a warm welcome or a rude remark. And one of the major treatments may be making this worse, according to new research. The debilitating movement disorder starts with tiny tremors and gradually seizes an individual’s ability to control movement, including speech. But it also often contributes to dementia, personality changes and other mental deficits, as countless doctors, researchers and families dealing with the disorder have documented. People with Parkinson’s disease often become socially withdrawn and uncomfortable. This social uneasiness may stem from the decreased ability of Parkinson’s sufferers to understand other people’s emotions, according to a study published in the March issue of Neuropsychology. “The idea here is that some of the brain regions that are impaired in Parkinson’s are also the brain regions that we use when we are interpreting emotion in other people, whether it be from the face of from the voice,” said lead author Heather Gray, psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass. Gray explained that Parkinson’s disease affects the basil ganglia area, located at the base of the brain, which controls involuntary movement and emotion in the brain. The disease results in the loss of nerve cells that produce dopamine, the brain’s “feel-good” chemical that also directs the function of muscles and movement. “There are pathways in between the basal ganglia and other areas that are involved in emotion recognition, and so if you disrupt one part of the circuit there, you disrupt the whole thing,” Gray said. She added that difficulty in emotion recognition does not necessarily have to connect directly with areas impacted by Parkinson’s disease. Gray collected data from 34 different studies with research specific to emotion recognition in people with Parkinson’s. “From the studies, we extracted data on how well people in the two groups performed on these tasks, with the two groups being people with Parkinson’s and their matched control” without the disease, she said. But a suc ---- Original Message ---------- From: rayilynlee <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Parkinson's impairs emotional communicaton and one treatment may make that worse Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2010 20:41:41 -0700 I disagree with this Ray Rayilyn Brown Past Director AZNPF Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation From: Diane Wyshak Sent: Friday, March 05, 2010 12:21 PM To: ray ; Dr. Kong Subject: Parkinson's impairs emotional communicaton and one treatment may make that worse http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=159547 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn