Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is named after the English physician James Parkinson who published the first detailed description of the disorder in the modern Western world. In 1817, Parkinson wrote his “Essay on the Shaking Palsy,” a short monograph which described the features of this disorder. Remarkably, of the six patients he described in his monograph, Parkinson treated only one of these individuals; the remaining five cases were individuals he had simply observed on the streets of his home town of London. Nevertheless, his keen eye noted many of the symptoms which are still considered to be the cardinal characteristics of the disorder he called the “shaking palsy.” In honor of this description, the disease was later named after Parkinson, a term first used by the famous French physician Charcot in the 1880s. Today, PD is the second most common neurodegenerative disease with an estimated five million cases worldwide, although with the aging of the world’s population, the number of individuals with PD in the world is estimated to double by 2030. Thus, this disorder remains as much as a challenge in the twenty-first century as it was when James Parkinson first wrote about it.