Today, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors declared April to be Parkinson’s Awareness Month.  In April alone, nearly 5,000 people in the US will learn they have Parkinson’s.  Robin Riddle with the American Parkinson Disease Association (APDA) Information & Referral Center at Stanford accepted the proclamation and spoke about the challenges of Parkinson’s Disease. 

In this recent blog post on the American Parkinson Disease Association (APDA) website, movement disorder specialist Dr. Rebecca Gilbert discusses the cognitive skills most frequently affected in PD — attention, working memory, executive function, memory, language, and visual reasoning.  Of course changes in the cognitive skills concern those with PD, their family members, and friends.

In this recent blog post on the American Parkinson Disease Association (APDA) website, movement disorder specialist Dr. Rebecca Gilbert discusses what is freezing of gait, why it happens, tips, strategies, and walking devices that can help, as well as potential future treatments.

Scent has been used as a diagnostic tool by physicians for thousands of years. But smell tests are not common in modern medicine—when’s the last time you were smelled by your doctor or received a batch of smell results back from the lab? Now, new research suggests that odors can be used to screen for Parkinson’s disease, which currently is without a definitive diagnostic.