Word: parkinsonism
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British film stuntman Tim Lawrence was only 34 when he was diagnosed with the debilitating neurological condition Parkinson's disease six years ago. It meant a swift end not just to his parts in movies like Braveheart, Splitting Heirs and Frankenstein, but also to an active lifestyle that included acrobatics, martial arts and skydiving. With his body alternating between rigidity and uncontrollable spasms, almost the only physical recreation left for Lawrence was going out with friends to London clubs. Under the strobe lights his thrashing movements could be mistaken for enthusiastic dancing. So clubs became the one place he didn...
...such a club three years ago that Lawrence took the illegal drug ecstasy. What happened next is promising to turn established theories about Parkinson's disease on their head. While experts still warn strongly against Parkinson's sufferers taking ecstasy, Lawrence may have stumbled accidentally on the nearest thing yet to a reliable treatment for the disease, which afflicts an estimated 4 million people worldwide. Within half an hour of taking ecstasy, Lawrence felt more than just the sense of elation users of the drug experience. For the first time in years, he regained control of his body...
...first, Lawrence regarded the episode as a freak occurrence. The symptoms of Parkinson's are notoriously unpredictable, and it seemed like just another of the disease's erratic turns. But then he tried ecstasy again, and once more he was able for hours at a time to regain something close to the athletic grace he once possessed. Yet when he mentioned the experience to his doctors, they dismissed it as a result of the street drug's known amphetamine qualities. So Lawrence thought little more about it, other than to make the most of ecstasy's unexpected side effect...
...however, Lawrence's discovery is being hailed as the beginning of a medical breakthrough. After seeing footage from a forthcoming bbc television documentary, two leading Parkinson's researchers have begun full-time investigation into why ecstasy has such a dramatic effect on his condition. The documentary, to be aired this week, shows Lawrence in a gym doing forward rolls, somersaults, backflips and swallow dives despite his debilitating condition. The researchers, Professor Alan R. Crossman and Dr. Jonathan M. Brotchie of the University of Manchester, are trying to find a component of the banned substance that might be developed into...
...Parkinson's is an incurable disorder of the central nervous system usually associated with the elderly but now increasingly affecting younger people. Sufferers include Muhammad Ali, Billy Graham, Janet Reno and, according to some reports, the Pope. But research into Parkinson's remained underfunded and under-publicized until actor Michael J. Fox announced he had the disease in 1998, having developed it a decade...