A PD VACCINE? WHO KNOWS?

UNMC researchers make progress on Parkinson's vaccine



(3/02/2010) KHAS-TV - Parkinson's Disease affects a million Americans. And, there is no cure. But researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center are making progress.

Researchers are developing a vaccine that slows the degeneration of nerve cells in the brain that link to motor activity.

Early results in mice show improvement in damaged cells. The findings may give researchers more insight into what causes Parkinson's and a possible cure.

"This is not a vaccine that will cure it. This is a vaccine that will halt its progression," said Dr. Howard Gendelman.

It is unknown if long time sufferers would benefit from these findings. The vaccine is being tested on humans and will be tested at UNMC within the next month. FDA approval of any vaccine is still a few years away.

WINTER WONDERLAND or A WEEKEND TO WONDER

I WONDER IF THIS IS NOT ENOUGH SNOW YET?

I WONDER IF MY NEW PHYSICAL THERAPY REGIMEN WILL IMPROVE MY POSTURE AND P.D. SYMPTOMS?

I WONDER IF WE WILL GET GOOD NEWS ON MY WIFE'S ULTRA SOUND GUIDED CORE TISSUE SAMPLES ?

I WONDER WHEN THE WALL STREET/BANKING CHICANERY WILL REALLY COME TO AN END?

I WONDER WHAT CHANGE HAS TAKEN PLACE ?

I WONDER WHY I WONDER ?

I WONDER IF I AM THE LUCKY ONE ?

PD IS NOT CANCER AND THAT I DON'T WONDER ABOUT.

INSTANT CATARACTS or MY NEWEST PD CONCERN

NUMBNESS, TINGLING & BURNING SENSATION OR INSTANT CATARACTS.

Many years ago my wife and I dined at a now defunct but most wonderful Mexican restaurant in New York. We were served our Margharitas and they were the best. Without ordering a second drink, our host arrived with what seemed to be a sink sized drink for each of us. We took our time and enjoyed our freebie. We had ordered our food when we placed the original drink order and about an hour had passed since then. We were finally served and found out the freebie and long wait was due to the Immigration Service raid on the kitchen help left the restaurant without any help with the exception of our host and his partner.
We didn't seem to mind since we were half looped by the tub sized drinks.
The next morning I was wakened by my wife's agitated cries for help.....
She had developed INSTANT CATARACTS overnight.
All ended well, she forgot to remove her contact lenses (thanks to the tub sized drink).
What has this to do with PD and me, well it seems I have developed instant and painful numbness and a burning tingling in my right arm and hand. It had occurred every so often in the past and I was told it had to do with a pinched nerve in the neck. It seems we PWP have neck issues.
For the last three days it has not subsided nor lessened in the pain factor. I had a stressful 12 days of traveling in the storms (ice/snow), exhibiting in a less than productive show, driving back in ice/snow, shoveling out my car from under 20+ inches of snow and keeping our aging Molly dog from freaking out at the depth of snow where she normally "goes".
I don't know now if this is the result of a pinched nerve or if something else is going on. I don't recall all the side effects of my meds, but somewhere I remember seeing something on the subject of numbness.
I will contact my MDS about this. I have already had a neck and upper spinal MRI and she saw nothing to be alarmed at. The normal aging process, arthritis,etc.
Has any one out experienced this???

WILL THE FAT LADY SING ? THAT IS THE QUESTION OF THE DAY.

The show is over. The anxiety of the trip to Nashville and the setup has passed. The shorter show schedule this year leaves us wondering who might have returned on Sunday (as is the custom at this show) to make their purchase. So, We ask will the fat lady sing? Time will tell.
While waiting for the answer we have new challenges. An unwanted but needed truck repair and a new winter storm to travel home with. Neither one is without tension and stress.

So goes the way of this President's day holiday.
The journey continues.

Three brain diseases linked by toxic form of same neural protein

Three brain diseases linked by toxic form of same neural protein

FYI A PROBLEM FOR MANY.

Parkinson's disease research uncovers social barrier

Science Centric (3 Feb 2010 12:04 GMT) - People with Parkinson's disease suffer social difficulties simply because of the way they talk, a McGill University researcher has discovered. Marc Pell, at McGill's School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, has learned that many people develop negative impressions about individuals with Parkinson's disease, based solely on how they communicate. These perceptions limit opportunities for social interaction and full participation in society for those with the disease, reducing their quality of life. Pell's research offers the public a better understanding of the difficulties these patients face - as well as an opportunity to promote greater inclusiveness... [full story]

LIFE AND TIME

January 27, 2010
EDITORIAL | APPRECIATIONS
A Responsible Man
By ROBERT B. SEMPLE Jr.
The news that Charles “Mac” Mathias had died at 87 of Parkinson’s disease aroused fond memories of a
slightly round and rumpled man who drove a battered blue station wagon to his Senate office and
sometimes brought his black Labrador retriever with him.
It also brought back memories of a time when legislative combat could be as fierce as it is now but when
there seemed to be more room for independent judgment — or, more accurately, when there were more
legislators willing to ignore their party’s disciplinarians and demagogues and act on principle alone. Mr.
Mathias, a Republican variously described as moderate or liberal, was just such a person. He represented
Maryland for 26 years in Congress, eight in the House and 18 in the Senate, before retiring in 1987.
Though he never considered leaving the Republican Party and supported Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972,
he was one of President Nixon’s most nettlesome opponents on legislation and the Vietnam War. He was an
early champion of campaign finance reform (never accepting a contribution, after Watergate, of more than
$100) and opposed the death penalty.
His signature issue was civil rights. It is not much remembered, but when President John F. Kennedy failed
to submit a promised civil rights bill, three Republicans introduced one of their own. This inspired Mr.
Kennedy to deliver on his promise, and it built Republican support for what became the Civil Rights Act of
1964. The three were Representatives William McCullough, John Lindsay and Mr. Mathias.
The lofty way to describe him would be to say that he voted his conscience. But as he saw it, he was simply
voting for things that everyone of conscience ought to support: respect for constitutional rights, respect for
the environment, respect for the balance of powers.
He once told The Times’s Tom Wicker that the senators he most admired were Democrats J. William
Fulbright, Mike Mansfield and Philip Hart, and Republicans John Sherman Cooper, Jacob Javits, George
Aiken and Clifford Case.
Why these? “Individual responsibility,” he answered. “Each one of these people would take an issue on his
own responsibility. They wouldn’t have to have the cover of some ideology. They’d simply come to the
conclusion that this was the right thing for the country.” That describes Mac Mathias.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

LIFE AND TIME

Taco Bell Founder Dies at 86
Glen W. Bell Jr. opened the first Taco Bell in Downey, California, in 1962.
By Courtney Rubin
Inc.'s Small Business Success Newsletter
Inspiring profiles and best practices for savvy business owners.
Glen W. Bell Jr., whose inspiration to put tacos on the drive-in menu
 created the 5,600-unit Taco Bell chain, died Sunday, the company 
announced on its website.
The entrepreneur was 86, and had suffered from Parkinson's disease since 1985.  No cause of 
death was released.
Bell—who spent his childhood peddling produce—decided he wanted
 his own food stand after spending a summer in high school in Washington
 working with a great aunt, learning how to bake blackberry pies and then
 selling them as Mrs. Dye's Homemade Pies. (He took home half of the
 $3,000 profit.)
After studying the successful McDonald's restaurants, in 1948 Bell
 opened Bell's Drive-In in San Bernardino, California. He began by serving the
 usual hamburgers and hot dogs, then in 1951 added a twist: Mexican
 food, namely 19-cent tacos. He also worked on other fastfood
 ventures, among them the first Der Weinerschnitzel hot dog stand, with 
his employee John Galardi. Galardi later turned the concept into his
 own 400-unit chain. Ed Hackbarth, another employee, left to open a competing drive-in that became the Del Taco chain.
With $4,000 raised from family and friends—no bank would give him a
loan—Bell's first Taco Bell started serving in Downey, Calif., in
1962. He quickly opened another eight restaurants, fulfilling a 
craving for Mexican food (or at least a fastfood version of it) people didn't know they had. When the first
 Taco Bell in Florida opened November 29, 1967, for example, residents were so clueless
 about the cuisine that Bell had to run advertisements defining menu
 tems and showing how to pronounce them. ("Yo quiero Taco Bell" and
 that now-famous Chihuahua didn't arrive until 1997.) In 2008, the
 singer Fergie gave the chain perhaps the ultimate shout-out, writing
 the lyrics "I'm no queen...I still go to Taco Bell, drive through" in
her hit song "Glamorous."
"I always smile when I hear people say that they never had a taco
 until Taco Bell came to town," Bell told Nation's Restaurant News in 2008, when the trade publication
 honored him with its Pioneer Award. "We changed the eating habits of 
the entire country."
Bell sold his first Taco Bell franchise in 1964 and sold the parent company to PepsiCo
 for $130 million in 1978. At the time of the acquisition, Taco Bell had 868 stores. The brand is now owned by
 Pepsi spinoff Yum Foods, the world's largest restaurant holding company.
"With Glen Bell's passing, we've lost one of our country's great
 entrepreneurs and innovators, but his legacy lives on in our people
 and our brand," Greg Creed, Taco Bell's president and chief concept 
officer, said in a statement on the company's web site.
Bell also leaves behind a personal business philosophy, which he enumerated in his 1999 biography Taco Titan as part of a list of 60 Recipes for Success that touched on the personal as well as the practical considerations of running a business. Among them:  No. 10. When you overextend yourself financially, it's twice as hard to get ahead, No. 21 Don't sell
 everything customers ask for, and No. 52: Your quality of life depends
 on your attitude.
Reprint from INC magazine article. Copywrited 2010 INC.

THE PASSAGE OF TIME AND LIFE

'Love Story' author Erich Segal dies at 72

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; B05

Erich Segal, a onetime classics professor who collaborated with the Beatles on a movie and whose sentimental 1970 screenplay and novel, "Love Story," became a pop-culture phenomenon, died Jan. 17 of a heart attack at his home in London. He was 72 and had battled Parkinson's disease for 25 years.

Mr. Segal, who taught Greek and Roman literature at Yale University, might have been an unlikely author of a heart-tugging tale of doomed romance, but his story captured the spirit of the time, and its signature line became a catch phrase: "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Mr. Segal dabbled in screenplays for years, and he said his writing credit on the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" in 1968 elicited open-eyed admiration from students and professors alike.

He had originally written "Love Story" as a screenplay about the star-crossed love between a working-class Italian girl from Radcliffe and a Harvard boy from an old family. The 1970 film, which starred Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal and became a huge hit, was in production before Mr. Segal reworked it as a novel. When "Love Story" was released in paperback, it had the largest print order in the publishing history at the time, with 4,325,000 copies.

Although Mr. Segal's work resonated with the public, critics almost uniformly lambasted it. The judges for the National Book Award threatened to resign unless "Love Story" was withdrawn from nomination.

"It is a banal book which simply doesn't qualify as literature," said novelist William Styron, the head judge of the fiction panel. "Simply by being on the list it would have demeaned the other books."

Mr. Segal was thrust from the life of a scholar to that of a jet-setting star. He appeared on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson four times in four weeks, was a judge at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay. He made weekend jaunts to Paris and London, returning to Yale for his classes on classical civilization, which filled a 600-seat auditorium and were among the most popular at the university.

"I'm kind of a folk hero there -- the closest thing they have to a Beatle," he told The Washington Post in 1970.

Mr. Segal also parlayed his love of running and knowledge of ancient Greece into a job as an ABC TV commentator for the Olympic Games.

Yale decided that Mr. Segal's extracurricular assignments were taking too much time away from his academic work and denied him tenure in 1972, a blow that took years to overcome. He continued to lead his intellectual double life as a popular novelist and serious scholar, publishing best-selling novels and works on ancient literature, but he remained puzzled at the mockery and anger of the literary elite.

While jogging in New York's Central Park, Mr. Segal once recalled, he saw novelist Philip Roth and said, "I admire your work."

"And I admire your running," Roth replied.

Mr. Segal said that he got swept up in the glamour and adulation of his "Love Story" fame.

"That kind of early success really turns your head," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1985. "You think you're invincible, you're infallible and that your star will shine forever, when in fact they'll be looking for somebody else next week."

Erich Wolf Segal was born June 16, 1937, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was the son of a rabbi. He studied Hebrew and other languages from an early age and became fluent in German and French, as well as Latin and Greek.

At Harvard, he received a bachelor's degree in 1958, a master's degree in classics in 1959 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1965. He published books on the Greek tragedian Euripides and the comic Roman playwright Plautus before writing "Love Story."

Mr. Segal's academic works received better reviews than his fiction, and he continued to write about classical literature for decades. His long-awaited history of comedy from ancient Greece to the modern era, "The Death of Comedy," appeared in 2001. After being denied tenure at Yale, Mr. Segal settled in England, where he became a fellow at Oxford University's Wolfson College.

He began running the Boston Marathon in 1955 and once completed the course in 2 hours, 56 minutes, 30 seconds. He ran 10 miles every day and played piano quite well before he was stricken by Parkinson's disease in the mid-1980s.

Mr. Segal never recaptured the level of success he had with "Love Story," although several of his later novels, including "Oliver's Story" (1977), "Man, Woman, and Child" (1983), "The Class" (1985) and "Doctors" (1987), were bestsellers, and several were made into movies.

In 1997, he disputed a rumor that "Love Story" was based on the college romance between Al and Tipper Gore. He did acknowledge that he had known Al Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones, in 1968 and drew on their lives for the central male character of "Love Story," Oliver Barrett IV.

Survivors include his wife of 34 years, Karen James, and two daughters.

"When I find myself feeling guilty for all that success and thinking 'Love Story' was overrated," Mr. Segal said in 1988, "I pull out my Encyclopedia Britannica and see myself listed as writing in the tradition of the classic sentimental novelists, and then my ego relights.

"It was my little Camelot and it can't be taken away. It was my idyll."

© 2010 The Washington Post Company