Parkinson's Disease: What is the Hope?

A couple of great persons, even honoring myself of their friendship, died in the recent years with a severe Parkinson: one is known to every Catholic and most religious but also several atheist person: former Bishop Carlo Maria Mar ni, who has probably not been Pope because of Parkinsons, instead of (or before) Ratzinger; the other was Giovanni Prodi, senior brother of the former European Commission President Romano: great mathemacian, dreaming of heaven as a place where theorems get really well! Wonderful persons all of their life, in prison in themselves when they were anymore able to execute their own commands as every terminal Parkinsonian: a sad disease indeed, being perfectly conscious to get less and less able to do, instead of the childhood serendipity of the terminal Alzheimer's patients, whose family is instead severely involved like for Parkinsonians. Marco Locatelli, a young great neurosurgeon grown in Milano University at Villani's school, and to me particularly dear being the son of one of my best former directors, Arturo, leads with others the tentative to implant an electrical stimulator to improve Parkinsonian's control: like for chronic pain, the marvelous negative feedback - making homeostatic even the ill brain - requires not to directly reduce tremor (in the other case pain), but instead to stimulate alternative paths able to feedback on stopping or at least reducing tremor (pain): probably thalamus for pain, mainly substantia nigra for Parkinson's Moreover, on a totally complementary point of view, a kind of behavioral therapy, like exploiting more ancestral paths and group synergies, makes Parkinsonians, almost not anymore able to walk, often still able to dance in group, like spas tics to play on time in an orchestra, as Pierangelo Sequeri, other great friend dean of Theology in Milano, shows in his wonderful orchestra Esagramma. Severe diseases, scientific approaches both physical and psychic: to understand the real phenomenon first, then to try to intervene at the roots of the problems, not just at the symptoms level, both on the pa tient, and on his circle: pain, as Pierangelo says when commenting Job's book in the Bible, can be understood in a theological perspective only as the mean to let friends care of you and tuhs become better