Parkinson’s Disease Breakthrough
Published: April 12, 2006
According to physicists who have developed a method to monitor how much Parkinson’s disease sufferers tremor, chaos theory could help monitor the effectiveness of treatment for the disease and aid in earlier diagnosis.
To date, there is no definitive test to identify Parkinson’s disease in its onset. Now, Renat Yulmetyev at Kazan State University in Russia and colleagues have adapted a statistical technique based on chaos theory, used to study earthquake vibrations, to monitor the distinctive progression of symptoms such as tremors.
Sixteen people in Canada who had Parkinson’s disease held their index fingers in the path of a laser beam for measurements of tremor frequency in their fingers and the team analyzed the results. Yulmetyev says in patients in the early stages of the disease, the tremor pattern is more chaotic.
As the disease takes hold, the tremors not only become more pronounced, but they become much more periodic and regular. Medication with the drug L-dopa causes the tremor patterns to become more chaotic again.
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