The first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease takes a long time to present its most common symptom, tremor. However, years before it appears, patients may show some signs, early symptoms. Detecting them early can help prevent or delay the onset of tremor.

Parkinson’s disease, early symptoms

The Royal Academy of Medicine of the Principality of Asturias invited Dr. Eduardo Tolosa to give a lecture in the city of Oviedo. Professor Tolosa’s lecture dealt with the first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. He made it clear that Parkinson’s disease takes many years to “show its face”. The prodromes are characterized, above all, by loss of smell, intense nightmares and nocturnal agitation and constipation and appear many years or even decades before the onset of tremor.

Delaying or avoiding tremor

However, these initial symptoms do not occur in all subjects. The most recent studies aim to identify those cases in which there are aggregates of a protein called synuclein in tissues outside the brain (e.g. in the intestinal tract) in the preclinical phase, in order to try in these cases to prevent or delay the onset of tremor and other classic motor symptoms.

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