Replies to post #56107 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[willco]

Sorry to hear about Andy. My uncle had it and it was not pleasant to see him go downhill. I hope something good comes of all this.

[mmoy]

I can understand his frustration with the lack of useful
treatment for this problem and how slow research development
can be. I'm more familiar with the three big psychiatric
problems of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar and these
have been thought to be the opposite of Parkinsons in that
they produce an excess of neurotransmitters. The treatments
can include medications that inhibit the neurotransmitters
which I guess is why you have Parkinsons-like symptoms.

The thing about those other three problems is that they affect
much higher percentages of the population and onset is much
earlier in life meaning that economic impacts are much, much
higher. And these three receive a decent amount of attention
by the research community and improvements and brain discoveries seems to be fairly steady.

I think that the biomedical research community and the drug
companies do incredible work. But they clearly do work on
some things much more than others.

[drjohn]

Nice article thanks for posting, not much has changed in our understanding of Parkinson’s since I first studied it as a young biochemist some 3 decades ago prior to entering medical school. Unfortunately what Doctor Lowe said about the human body being a lot more complex than silicon is very true. Human and biological systems involve a level of parallelism that make microprocessors look like a piece of cake. And unfortunately the easy stuff or low lying fruit is often discovered first, levo dopa was the low lying fruit in the case of Parkinson’s, but its remarkable how it can add decades of quality life to a person. The way most disease processes are being handled these days is basically we are nickel and diming them to squeeze more answers and quality of life out of them. We are all fortunate Andy Grove is tackling Parkinson’s with his usual zeal something good has already come from his misfortunate.