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> > Celia: > I'm shooting a little above my authorized level on this > one, but here goes nevertheless. > Based on some data in my ever increasing stack of stuff: > Ms. Hepburn has secondary or symptomatic parkinsonism. She > lived through and allegedly succumbed to the epidemic of viral > (Von Economo's) encephalitis that occurred around the > 1918-1920 time frame. A frequent left-over of this infection > was secondary parkinsonism. Supposedly she still has a > reasonable population of subtantia nigra and hence doesn't > qualify for a full blown diagnosis of our friend... Idiopathic > Parkinson's Disease. One telltale, at least from my point of > view, is that her symptoms don't seem to have worsened in the 3 > to 4 decades I've lusted after her. > Many of you who are old enough to have lived through that > period were probably asked, early in your cycle of neurological > interviews, whether you had the virus . It's an important > discriminant in the PD diagnosis process. > dB > > ======================================================== > David Barthuli > 76H Coffin Avenue > Haverhill, Massachusetts 01830, USA > (508) 521-0879 > [log in to unmask] > ========================================================= > Dear David, Thank you for your information about Katherine Hepburn. I still can't understand why she never mentioned her "essential tremor" in her autobiography, and I feel this condition seemed to worsen considerably over the years and was so much more evident in her later movies. Celia Jones