Parkinson's Another Look

Download or read book Parkinson's Another Look written by Lawrence Broxmeyer and published by . This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent studies in the Parkinson's disease literature have cited a tuberculosis-like germ called nocardia as being responsible for Parkinson's of unknown cause (Kohbata and Shimokawa, 1993) (Beaman, Beaman and Kjelstrom, 1994) (Kohbata and Beaman, 1991). Kohbata seemingly cemented a relationship between nocardia and Parkinson's by finding serologic evidence in 20 of 20 Parkinson's patients. With this finding, Kohbata acknowledged that blood tests for nocardia and the mycobacteria such as tuberculosis often cross-react, as they belong to the same order of bacteria, the Actinomycetales. Besides this difficulty in differentiation, a well used medical school textbook of microbiology points out that even among experts, different observers may classify the same strain of bacteria as nocardia or Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Atlas, 1988). To add to existing difficulties, both microorganisms can be "acid-fast," retaining a characteristic reddish color after being washed with acid alcohol, a common laboratory reagent. Such a staining characteristic has long been used to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis.