When Michael J. Fox returns to television with his new comedy series on September 26, he will still be suffering from Parkinson’s disease, a progressive, incurable neurological affliction from which he’s publicly suffered from for over two decades.
“I have challenges that come with Parkinson’s,” he’s reportedly said, “but my experience is to deal with things through humor.”
Parkinson’s affects over 1 million adults in the U.S., with symptoms such as shaking, difficulty walking and speaking, rigidity, slowness and balance problems, and may cause depression and sleep disorders. A degenerative disorder of the brain, it results from the death of dopamine-containing cells in a region of the midbrain. Currently the causes of this cell death remain unknown.
So what has enabled 52-year-old Fox, who retired from the hit series “Spin City” in 2000 because of his symptoms, to now return to the demands of a series?
Fox told Diane Sawyer in a May, 2012 interview that he “stumbled on a new combination of meds that reduced dyskinesia [involuntary movements] which I had really bad earlier… Once that was tackled, to the point where I can be as still as I am now, I thought, there’s no reason not to work.”
According to a blog post on the website of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, this drug is amantadine, originally used to combat the flu in older people.
“They found out that for those older people who also had Parkinson’s and took Parkinson’s medications for dyskinesia, that it worked effectively on a large amount of the patients who took this medication,” Fox told Sawyer. “So it eventually got repurposed. Well, now I have less dyskinesia and don’t get the flu. So that’s kinda nice.”
Doctors have found, however, that what works for Michael J. Fox (or any individual patient) doesn’t work for everyone, according to neuroscientist Todd Sherer, Ph.D., the CeO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
“It’s important for patients to have good interactions with their doctor to come up with the optimized regimen that works for them,” Sherer says. “That can also vary over time as the disease progresses or the person’s health changes.”
While there have been no major advances in drugs used to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s in the last several years, doctors have become more adept at using existing medications, says neurologist Alessandro DiRocco, M.D., director of the NYU Langone Parkinson’s and Movement Disorder Center.
“In medicine,” says Di Rocco, “how we use the medication is often as important as the medication we use.”
Researchers and doctors have also found that medications tend to become less effective over time. “But in a number of people, including Michael J. Fox, they continue to be effective and allow people to go on with their lives,” says Di Rocco, who is not involved with Fox’s care.
“A lot of people with Parkinson’s continue to work and have productive lives.”
Sherer says that a major focus of Fox’s Foundation is to develop a cure for Parkinson’s, to identify what actually causes Parkinson’s in order to “get rid of it.”
“We’ve learned a lot in the last two years about the genetics of Parkinson’s and the molecular triggers leading to the degeneration of the cells in the brain,” Sherer says. “That’s where a big focus of research is, to try and convert that knowledge into new therapies.”
Sherer urges people with and without Parkinson’s to participate in clinical trials, which can be found through the Fox Foundation at its Fox Trial Finder.
“All the [advances] are because people with Parkinson’s participate in research as partners with the medical scientists and doctors. I could dream of every theory I wanted to as to what causes Parkinson’s, but we can’t test these theories without a partnership with people with Parkinson’s.”