Well, setting a goal of publishing a new post within two weeks of my last post didn’t quite work. Despite my best intentions and adding a reminder to my calendar, I still missed the date by, oh let’s say 2 (OK 3) weeks.  Back in the days before retirement, I used a system called the Franklin Planner to plan out everyday, so maybe I need to do something similar now – NOT!  While it was an interesting (and expensive) planning system complete with training on how to use, fancy binders and custom calendar pages, I still missed a goal or two and I was quite happy to discard the entire system upon retirement.  But enough excuses, I’ll just chalk this one up as a learning experience and remember to not promise any deliverables.😀

What I did promise last post was that this post would cover some of the latest news about PD and I will stick to that deliverable.  One of the new blogs that I now follow is The Science of Parkinson’s .  If you haven’t already discovered this site, click on the link to view the site and sign up for posts.  This site is the first I’ve found that does a superb job of taking the latest scientific publications and breaking it down to plain, understandable english.   The author is Simon Stott, and he has been working in the field of Parkinson’s disease research for over 15 years (both in academia and biotech). 

Each month, he publishes a Monthly Research Review in addition to his posts about a single research topic.  You can view the June 2018 review here.  This month there have been several great posts about the latest research and all in a readable and understandable format.  The top story this month has been the report that researchers have found that graphene dots may prevent alpha synuclein from clumping, and even better, they appear to cause the clumps already formed to break up and disappear!    I realize I threw out some new scientific words but if you go to the article here, you will get a full description of alpha synuclein and graphene dots and more.  (At least I didn’t use the actual title of the research report – Graphene Quantum Dots Appear to Prevent α-synucleinopathy in Parkinson’s disease)

So it appears these graphene dots stop the clumping of alpha synuclein and break up the existing clumps in the mouse model of PD which is a great step forward.  As always though, we have to hope the research results are the same (or better) when they conduct clinical trials on current patients.

And speaking of clinical trials, if you haven’t signed up for the Fox Insight study, please go here and join us in the largest longitudinal study of PD and the impact it has on each patient.  If you didn’t see the Micheal J Fox interview with Jane Pauly regarding the Fox Insight study a few weeks ago, you can view it here.

In the other news category, the Parkinson’s Foundation has released it’s Parkinson’s Prevalence Project results which predicts there will be over 930,000 PD patients in the US and Canada by 2020 and 1.2 million by 2030.  They also show the prevalence by state along with many other statistics.  You can view the summary study here.  Interesting findings and this study will hopefully help our efforts for more funding for PD research.

And finally, when I contacted Simon Stott about his website, he recommended some other sites that I found interesting so I have updated my blog list page with those sites, Simon’s site and a new category of sites, PD News Aggregators. 

As always,thanks for reading.