Word: parkinsonism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...commit suicide with lethal doses of prescribed medication. In 2007, some 46 people committed suicide in Oregon under the law. Last November Washington voters passed a similar provision that allows patients with six or fewer months to live to self-administer lethal doses of medication. Washington's former governor, Parkinson's sufferer Booth Gardner, stumped for the law, while opponents included Martin Sheen, who starred in television commercials urging voters to shoot down the initiative...
First described in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson's disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again...
...admitted. "The first time I was scheduled for a four-city swing ... flying commercial, I felt some pangs of regret." The traffic was awful. His plane to Memphis was late. But then he found himself in an intense conversation about stem-cell research with a man suffering from Parkinson's. "These are the stories you miss, I thought to myself, when you fly on a private jet," he concluded. (Read "Did Daschle Bow Out Too Soon, or Was It Inevitable...
...time, he can watch Type 1 diabetes unfold in a petri dish as a patient's cells develop from their embryonic state into mature pancreatic cells. The same will be true for other diseases as well. "There is a good reason we don't have treatments for diseases like Parkinson's," says Melton. "That's because the only way science can study them is to wait until a patient appears in the office with symptoms. The cause could be long gone by then, and you're just seeing the end stages." No longer. Now the major steps in the disease...
Realizing that potential - and with it, the prospect of successful treatments for conditions like Parkinson's or diabetes - may still be a few years away. Even iPS cells have yet to prove that they are a safe and suitable substitute for the diseased cells they might eventually replace in a patient. Ensuring their safety would require doing away with dangerous genes that can also cause cancer, as well as the retroviral carriers that Yamanaka originally used. Melton's team has already replaced two of the genes with chemicals, and he anticipates that the remaining ones will be swapped...