Scientist fights disease at work - and in life
Thursday, April 1, 1999
By CAROL SMITH P-I REPORTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Paul Gladstone understands at a more intimate level than most the anatomy of
the damaged brain.
As a scientist, he is on working terms with the intricate molecular pathways
in the brain. He can describe what happens when neurons die and
neurotransmitters disappear. He details which circuits get disrupted, which
loops of neural programming get erased.
As a patient, he lives with the consequences.
On this particular day, Gladstone, 51, is hunched over his kitchen table
contemplating the links between the immune system and the central nervous
system, two areas of particular scientific interest to him.
He speaks rapidly in a soft, breathy voice, barely audible at times. His
words tumble over each other, the sentences speeding away from him like
eager dogs let out on a trail. He pauses frequently, as if to call back his
thoughts, before his words take off again. It's a curious, involuntary
acceleration of speech. It's also a symptom of Parkinson's disease.
There are other signs as well. His body has a strangely restless quality, as
though he were responding to a cacophony of nervous impulses. His foot rocks
with a constant tremor. His hands shake. When he crosses the room, his gait
is unsteady, his balance tenuous. He still has a yellowing bruise on one
cheekbone from a recent spill.
It's a particularly cruel turn for Gladstone, whose second love is the
stage. A former actor with an improv group, it's as though his body now
improvises without him.
Diagnosed at 38, Gladstone is one of the growing number of younger people
with Parkinson's, a disease that attacks the brain's main motor signal
pathways. Relentless and progressive, it eventually disconnects the mind and
body so patients lose the ability to initiate or control movement.
Effortless movement is, by definition, something most of us don't think much
about. When we walk, we don't have to will our arms to swing in opposition
to our steps. When we're amused, we laugh without considering how to arrange
our facial muscles to convey our emotion.
For Parkinson's patients, however, that autopilot function is turned off.
Controlling movement requires intense concentration and exertion.
Although no two people with Parkinson's exhibit symptoms exactly the same
way, the most recognizable signs are a tremor in the hands and feet,
rigidity and a stooped posture.
The disease leads to a profound poverty of movement that robs patients of
gesture and expression. Their faces take on an unblinking, masklike look;
they take short, shuffling steps; their arms don't swing. They may slow to
the point of freezing. With no balance reflexes, they frequently fall. About
30 percent of patients eventually suffer some cognitive impairment, ranging
from memory lapse to dementia.
Scientists know the disorder stems from a shortage of dopamine, a chemical
messenger necessary for the smooth transmission of motor signals. And they
know the shortage is caused by the death of the main dopamine-producing
neurons in the brain. They can even pinpoint where in the brain the cells
begin to die.
But they don't know what causes the neurons to die.
Treatment, vastly improved in recent years, means many patients can live for
years with relative control of their symptoms.
But in the end, there is no stopping it - at least not yet.
"It is the second most common degenerative disorder after Alzheimer's," said
Dr. Sean Grady, a neurosurgeon at Harborview Medical Center and professor at
the University of Washington. "Everyone knows someone with Parkinson's."
Gladstone first suspected something was wrong when one arm didn't swing
correctly when he went jogging. He had other subtle symptoms as well - a
puzzling slowing of his movements, a breathiness that stole into his voice.
A research immunologist, Gladstone's scientific intuition told him something
wasn't working right.
It would be two years before his diagnosis, however, because few doctors
thought to consider Parkinson's in someone so young.
"The doctors couldn't see my symptoms, but they believed me," he said. "They
just couldn't tell me what was wrong."
There is no blood test or laboratory test for Parkinson's. Only an autopsy
can lead to a definitive diagnosis.
Like detectives, pathologists dust for fingerprints of the disease on the
brain. In Parkinson's patients, slides of brain tissue show distinctive
granules of dark matter called Lewy bodies strewn throughout the area
damaged by the disease.
These dark clumps appear to be related to the breakdown of the neurons, said
Dr. Donald Calne, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver and a Parkinson's expert. They may be made of cellular refuse, the
miscellaneous building blocks in the structure of the cell.
"They're like little bags of bones," he said.
For the living, there is no such telltale evidence. In the absence of lab
tests, doctors must deduce Parkinson's from its symptoms.
Frustrated by a lack of answers, Gladstone finally went to the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minn., where a doctor recognized the Parkinsonian quality of
his voice and speech patterns.
It was almost worse knowing. "I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity,"
he said. "It's easier to deny something that doesn't have a name."
For about six years after the diagnosis, Gladstone hid the disease from
colleagues, not wanting to lose his place in the fast-paced,
ultra-competitive world of medical research.
Then a senior scientist with Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co., he was studying the
regulation of the immune system at the cellular level.
"I was afraid they would take me less seriously," said Gladstone, who earned
his doctorate in genetics from Harvard University and worked for a time as a
researcher at the University of Washington.
As the disease progressed, however, it became more difficult to hide - and
not just from colleagues.
Separated from his wife, he has an 8-year-old daughter, Danielle, who spends
two nights a week with him. Danielle learned at an early age the nuances of
the disease.
"Since I've been alive, my Dad has had it," she said. It means she must help
him around the house and explain to friends why her Dad seems different
sometimes.
When his medication starts wearing off, for example, Gladstone's face begins
to freeze. She tells friends: "Poppy doesn't smile when he gets stiff."
She is nonchalant about occasionally having to help her Dad up when he
falls.
"Most kids don't have to worry about doing stuff like that at such a young
age," she said. "It makes you so that you recognize things when people need
your help."
As his motor control became more erratic, Gladstone eventually had to let go
of his bench work in the lab. He stopped working full-time about a year ago.
"I couldn't do the fine-motor work anymore," he said. But his mind is still
a working laboratory. He reads constantly and communicates with researchers
all over the country, looking for new ideas about the disease.
He's also in demand as a consultant, brainstorming with colleagues and
ferreting out new directions for research.
"Paul was always an extraordinarily creative thinker," said Jerry Nepom,
director of Virginia Mason Research Center, during one such session
recently.
Others try to think outside the box, he said. "There is no box for Paul."
In some ways, however, having Parkinson's has changed how Gladstone
approaches scientific questions.
He knows the forces that drive "big science.'' He knows how easy it is to
forget about the patients behind the disease.
"Before I got sick, I didn't think: This is about sick people, people who
need help," he said of his days in the lab. "I have very different criteria
for judging research now. So much federally funded research has so much to
do with its own internal logic, and so little to do with patients. I wish
there were a patient on every institute panel - a group of people, patients,
asking: 'What will this (study) do for the patient?' "
Gladstone hopes that will happen someday. In the meantime, he focuses on not
letting Parkinson's take over his life.
"Having Parkinson's has meant losing so much of what characterized me as a
person - my work, my energy, my acting, my relationship with my daughter,"
he said. "No area of my life is unspared."
But he refuses to give in to the disease, and he continues to search for
answers.
He acknowledges that having a scientist for a patient has been a challenge
for his doctor.
"She tells me to just back off and take my pills and be a patient, but I
can't," he said. "That's not me. I'm always trying to figure out another
way."
n P-I reporter Carol Smith can be reached at 206-448-8070 or
[log in to unmask]
Bill Bell
Executive Director
Northwest Parkinson's Foundation
425-746-5556 / [log in to unmask]
http://www.nwpf.org
