Parkinson’s Disease Essays -- Health, Diseases

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders and is classified as a movement disorder with the presence of the motor symptoms bradykinesia, tremor and rigidity. The literature on the management of PD motor symptoms focuses extensively on the medical treatment and outlines the vast advancements that drug therapy has seen over the past 40 years. There are beneficial outcomes of medicinal therapy on the treatment of motor symptoms; however, extensive research also finds there is a wearing off effect as well as potential for motor and nonmotor side effects. As the pharmacological research continues their search for the ideal medical treatment model, awareness of the psychosocial symptoms and the potential burden on caregivers has also achieved much attention in the last few decades. The increasing interest in the psychosocial characteristics of the disease appears to stem from the evolving scientific knowledge of the disease and its lack of a cure. Compounding the sequelae of PD, nonmotor challenges are sometimes unrelated to the common progression of PD and dopamine deficiency. Clinical diagnosis of PD is often confounded by the psychosocial realm of the patients daily functioning and the impact it has on the care and treatment of patients. This paper summarizes the literature of PD from a psychosocial perspective. The first chapter reviews the intrinsic psychosocial symptoms of PD and how they may or may not be influenced by dopamine neurotransmitters. The second chapter examines the side effects of three commonly prescribed medications used to treat PD. The last chapter focuses on implications the disease has on the caregiver’s own personal well-being. Introduction: Parkinson’s Dise... ... cognitive, dementia, levodopa, MAO-B inhibitors, dopamine agonist + side/adverse effects and caregiver/burden/distress. All searches were limited to English language and the years 2000 - 2010. I also referred to reference lists found in articles deemed relevant to the research project. A few reviews were outside the limits of the year restriction but were included as they added to the scope of this paper. The abstracts were reviewed and deemed to be relevant for the inclusion in this literature search based on its focus and relevancy to the topics outlined in this paper. My initial search yielded over 1000 hits from the various literature databases for this paper, of which 61 were included in this review. Those that were excluded were duplicate hits found in the various databases or had a focus on an unrelated subject matter after a review of the abstract.