Dear list members,
One thing about Marjories statistics doesn't go out of my
mind. It is not the fact that PD. can cause death. I did my
exam neurology in 1968. In the book from that pre-l-dopa era
it was said the longest time one could live with PD was 15
year.The puzzling fact from the statistics is the big diffe-
rence between black and white. The numbers are not percen-
tages but mere counts of cases. The diferences seem to be
big enough to conclude that for whites the chance to dy from
PD is much greater than for blacks. If that is not so I
must be mistaken about the quanteties of the US population.
I read before I saw these statistics in a book from 1982 that
the frequency of PD in different parts of the world seems to
be constant. An exception are blacks in the USA and South
Africa. They have less chance to get PD. That is consonant
with the statistics,but doesn't answer the question why this
is so.
Reading some days ago in articles from this list and from
Cottinghams archive,I came accross the following: 30% of the
population of the US have no access to neurological medical
care if they are not in a life threatening situation. So many
cases of PD are never diagnosed an can not be found in any
statistic. My Question now is: is it possibly true that the
differences we see in the death stastistics are caused by
Existing differences in accessibility of health care for dif-
ferent races.
Ida Kamphuis
Holland
