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It is interesting to speculate about when one's PD first surfaced. Its safe to say the onset took place many years earlier, except in cases like MPTP ingestion, where a drug targeted the brain cells that produce dopamine and wiped them out. Since it has been said, and generally accepted, that 70 percent of the dopaminergic cells in the brain have perished before PD becomes apparent, it seems to me to be an entirely subjective and imprecise measure to include in a signature. Who can tell how fast this loss took place, or what caused it. The symptoms perceived in hindsight may, or may not, have had anything to do with PD. The date of diagnosis, however, is exact. My husband's foot and leg numbness, for example, may have been due to his increasing problem with scoliosis and to a foot deformity instead of to Parkinsons. Or not. In hindsight, he remembers being unusually tired when hiking uphill in the Yosemite high country 20 years ago. But he was getting older and we had just driven from a 300 foot elevation to 9000 feet. So was that the onset date or not? Impossible to tell. Perhaps it happened 30 years ago at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda where passengers disembarking from Khartoum were not allowed off the plane until they were sprayed with DDT to prevent a tsetse fly invasion. There is value in collecting accounts of what we think are the markers for the onset of our own individual cases. Has that ever been done? It would be interesting to compile these stories. So I remain: Martha Rohrer CG for Neal 78/13 Selma, California [log in to unmask]