smell

Nutrition-packed summer recipe for people with Parkinson’s

August 1, 2019 Life

Jane McClenaghan, a nutritional therapist and author based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, runs cookery classes and diet clinics which help people living with Parkinson’s.

This two-course meal, from her book ‘The Vital Nutrution Cookbook’, is packed full of anti-inflammatory ingredients like cinnamon and ginger, a helping of fish for omega-3 and baked nectarines to offer an easy-to-swallow treat for dessert.

First course – Thai fishcakes with zingy salsa

Vital nutrition fishcakes

Thai fishcakes with zingy salsa made by nutritional therapist Jane McClenaghan

Ingredients
5-7oz. white fish
4 scallions, chopped
1 inch fresh ginger, grated
1 tsp Thai green curry paste
1 egg, beaten
2 tbsp chopped cilantro
1 tbsp flour
Juice and zest of a lime
Black pepper
1 tsp coconut oil

Method

  • Finely chop the fish and place in a large bowl with the spring onions, ginger, curry paste, fish sauce, egg and cilantro.
  • Mix well and then stir in the flour, lime juice and zest and season with black pepper. The mixture may be a bit wet at this stage. You can add a bit more flour if you like.
  • Divide into four generous portions. Put a little flour on your hands and form each portion into a ball. Flatten slightly and fry in the coconut oil for five to eight minutes until golden brown and cooked through.
  • Serve with a green salad or my zingy salsa (below).

For the salsa

½ cucumber, finely chopped
½ red onion, finely chopped
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 red pepper, finely chopped
½ fresh chilli, finely chopped
2 tbsp fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp chives, chopped
Juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper

Method

  • For the salsa, place all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well together. Season to taste.
  • To serve, pile the salsa high on your plates alongside the fishcakes.

Dessert – Cinnamon nectarines with vanilla scented yogurt

vital nutrition baked nectarines

Cinnamon nectarines with vanilla scented yoghurt by Jane McClenaghan

Ingredients (serves 2)

1-2 tsp agave syrup
2 nectarines, halved with stone removed
½-1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ vanilla bean
2 tbsp Greek yogurt

Method

  • Preheat your oven to 350F.
  • Drizzle a little agave syrup over each nectarine half and sprinkle with cinnamon. Cover with tinfoil and bake for 15-20 minutes until soft.
  • Slice the vanilla bead lengthways and, with the tip of a sharp knife, scrape out the seeds and stir into the Greek yogurt.
  • Serve the nectarines hot or cold with a drizzle of agave syrup and a dollop of the vanilla scented Greek yogurt.

Recipes are taken from Jane McClenaghan’s book, ‘The Vital Nutrition Cookbook’.
Article from Parkinson’s Life.

Read more

8 Early Parkinson’s Disease Symptoms That Are Too Easy to Miss

June 5, 2018 Education

This movement disorder is more treatable when caught early, but Parkinson’s disease symptoms can appear quite differently from one person to another. Talk to your doctor if you’re worried about any of these signs.

Changed handwriting

If your handwriting starts to go from big and loopy to small and cramped, this could be one of the earliest Parkinson’s disease symptoms. “Teachers with Parkinson’s will notice students complaining that they can’t read their handwriting when they write on the blackboard,” says Deborah Hall, MD, a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Look for letters getting smaller and words crowding together. Many patients have slower movement and trouble with repetitive tasks, like handwriting.

Reduced sense of smell

If you’re having trouble smelling pungent foods or no longer pick up your favorite scents, see a doctor. It’s not the most common symptom of Parkinson’s, but Dr. Hall says patients who suffer a loss of smell report it being the earliest sign they experience. The link between reduced sense of smell and Parkinson’s isn’t clear, but one theory is that the clumps of the protein alpha-synuclein, found in the brains of all Parkinson’s patients, may form in the part of the brain responsible for smell before migrating to other areas and affecting motor function.

Trouble sleeping

If you were once a peaceful sleeper, but now toss and turn, flail your limbs, or even fall out of bed, those sleep problems could be Parkinson’s disease symptoms. It’s normal to have an occasional restless night, but talk to your doctor if you or your partner notices extra movement when you’re in a deep sleep, or if you start sleep-talking. More research is needed to discover why disturbed sleep and Parkinson’s are related, but one theory is that the degeneration of specific regions of the brain stem that can cause disordered sleeping may play a role in other Parkinson’s disease symptoms.

Constipation

If you’re not moving your bowels every day, or are increasingly straining, this can be an early sign of Parkinson’s. The disease alters the body’s autonomic nervous system, which controls processes like digestion and bowel function. Constipation on its own isn’t unusual, but if you’re experiencing other symptoms like difficulty sleeping and trouble moving or walking, talk to your doctor.

Depression

Much has been made of the link between the late comedian Robin Williams’ Parkinson’s diagnosis and ongoing battle with depression. Sometimes patients can develop depression after learning they have Parkinson’s, but it’s also common for people to be depressed years before they start to exhibit physical symptoms, says Michele Tagliati, MD, director of the Movement Disorders Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California. “Parkinson’s is characterized as a movement disorder because of a lack of dopamine in the brain, but there are also low levels of other neurotransmitters like serotonin, which are intimately related to depression,” he says. Parkinson’s patients who are depressed tend to feel apathetic and generally disinterested in things they used to enjoy, compared to feeling intensely sad or helpless, as is common in primary depression. “They lose pleasure in the simple things of life, like waking up in the morning and buying the paper,” says Dr. Tagliati. Treatment for depression includes counseling, antidepressant medication, and in the most extreme cases, electric shock therapy.

Tremors or shaking when relaxed

Shaking can be normal after lots of exercise or if you’re anxious, or as a side effect of some medications. But a slight shake in your finger, thumb, hand, chin, lip, or limbs when your body is at rest and your muscles are relaxed could signal Parkinson’s disease symptoms, according to the National Parkinson Foundation. About 70 percent of people with the disease experience a resting tremor, and it can become more noticeable during stress or excitement. These are the most common symptom and often tip people off to the disease, but when Parkinson’s patients think back they realize they experienced loss of smell, disturbed sleep, or anxiety before the tremors began.

Stiffness and slowed movements

Watch for an abnormal stiffness in your joints along with muscle weakness that doesn’t go away and makes everyday tasks like walking, teeth brushing, buttoning shirts, or cutting food difficult. If you no longer swing your arms when walking, your feet feel “stuck to the floor” (causing you to hesitate before taking a step), or people comment that you look stiff when you haven’t been injured, the National Parkinson Foundation suggests seeing a doctor.

Softer voice, or masked face

Doctors say that a softer voice or masked, expressionless face is a common sign of the disease. Some patients with Parkinson’s disease symptoms may also talk softer without noticing or have excessively fast speech or rapid stammering. Parkinson’s causes disruption of movement, including facial muscles.

Article from Reader’s Digest.

Read more

New smell test could aid early detection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

January 1, 2018 Education, Research

Nisha Pradhan was seven when she began to suspect she was missing out on something. Her sister seemed to have an uncanny knack for predicting what their mother was making for dinner. Pradhan, meanwhile, never had a clue.

“I would just stare at her,” Pradhan says. “She’s younger than me—how does she know more than I do?”

Now 21, Pradhan knows she has a limited ability to detect odor—including the smell of dinner cooking. Her situation is not unique: The sense of smell is often taken for granted, until it malfunctions.

As a patient in a clinical trial being conducted at Rockefeller University, Pradhan is helping scientists develop new smell tests, which promise to help improve diagnosis because they can be used reliably for anyone, anywhere. Because smell disorders can be linked to a variety of health conditions—interfering with appetite, as well as social interaction and sometimes leading to isolation, anxiety, and depression.

“People have their vision and hearing tested throughout their lives, but smell testing is exceedingly rare,” says neuroscientist Leslie Vosshall.

The new tests, developed by Vosshall along with Julien Hsieh, a Rockefeller clinical scholar, and their colleagues could even aid the early detection of neurological disorders that have been linked to problems with olfaction.

An underappreciated skill

People suffer from smell loss for various reasons—a head trauma or sinus infection, for example, or even a common cold—and the cause can be as hard to pinpoint as the condition itself. In Pradhan’s case, she believes she lost much of her sense of smell as a young child, although she’s not sure how. She brought the issue up with her pediatrician, but never received any testing or guidance.

Both the medical community and the people affected by smell loss can be prone to overlook it. “Olfies,” says Pradhan, referring to people with a normal sense of smell, “think not having a sense of smell just affects our ability to detect gas leaks, smoke, and bad body odor. But it deprives us of so much more, including emotions and memories that are so intimate and integral to the human experience.”

A handful of tests already exist for diagnosing people like her. One problem with these tests is that they rely on a patient’s ability to detect and identify single types of odor molecules, such as rose-scented phenylethyl alcohol. However, the ability to detect odors and to recognize them can vary greatly between people. So, someone with an otherwise normal sense of smell may not be able to detect the rose molecule. Meanwhile, another person who can smell roses but is from an area where these flowers are scarce may struggle to put a name to the scent. In either case, there is the potential for misdiagnosis, particularly when testing across different populations and countries.

The problem of smell

Hsieh and colleagues set out to eliminate these potential biases with the help of “white smells,” made by mixing many odors together to produce something unfamiliar. Just as a combination of wavelengths of light produces white light, and many frequencies of sound make up white noise, the team generated white smells from assortments of 30 different odor molecules. Their two new tests ask patients to distinguish white smells with overlapping ingredients and to detect white smells at increasingly lower concentrations.

If a person is unable to detect a single component of the test scent, this has little effect on the outcome, and test takers don’t need to identify the odor at all. “We’re really excited about these new tests,” says Vosshall, who is Robin Chemers Neustein Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “They focus on the problem of smell itself, because they don’t force people to match smells to words.”

Clinical trials conducted at The Rockefeller University Hospital and Taichung Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan showed that the new tests detected smell loss more reliably than conventional options. The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, open up the possibility of a new means to detect smell loss worldwide. It could be used for detection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, says Hsieh, now a resident at the Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland.

“The goal is to use changes in the sense of smell, along with other biomarkers, to identify underlying causes of these neurological disorders very early, and so potentially improve treatment,” he says.

 

Article from The Rockefeller University.

Read more

Scratch-and-Sniff Test Could Predict Parkinson’s Even Earlier

October 1, 2017 Education, Life, Research

A new study provides further evidence that a simple scratch-and-sniff test could predict Parkinson’s disease even earlier than previously thought.

According to Michigan State University researcher Honglei Chen, lead author and professor of epidemiology, the test could potentially identify certain people who are at an increased risk of developing the disease up to 10 years before they are actually diagnosed. Previous research has shown an association between sense of smell and disease progression of up to four to five years.

The federally funded study, now published online in Neurology, the official publication of the American Academy of Neurology, is also one of the first to follow black people.

“One of the key differences in our study was we followed older white and black participants for an average of about 10 years, much longer than any other previous study,” Chen said. “We found that there was a strong link between smell and disease risk for up to six years. After that, the link remained, but just wasn’t as strong.”

He added that the relationship between smell and Parkinson’s risk in black participants also appeared not as strong as in the white participant group.

“Previous studies have shown that black people are more likely to have a poor sense of smell than whites and yet may be less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease,” said Chen, who is part of MSU’s Global Impact Initiative, an effort to help accelerate research in key areas affecting the world such as health and energy.

“We found no statistical significance for a link between poor sense of smell and Parkinson’s disease in blacks, but that may have been due to the small sample size and more research is needed.”

The study also found that older men with a poor sense of smell were more likely to develop the disease compared to women.

The study included 1,510 white and 952 black participants with an average age of 75. The test asked people to smell 12 common odors including cinnamon, lemon, gasoline, soap and onion, and then select the correct answer from four choices.

Based on their scores, participants were divided into three groups – poor sense of smell, medium and good. Researchers then monitored participant health through clinical visits and phone interviews for more than a decade.

Overall, 42 people developed Parkinson’s during the study including 30 white people and 12 black people.

People with poor sense of smell were nearly five times more likely to develop the disease than people with a good sense of smell. Of the 764 people with a poor sense of smell, 26 people developed the disease, compared to just seven of the 835 people whose sense of smell was good and nine of the 863 people whose sense of smell was categorized as medium.

Researchers also discovered that the results stayed the same after adjusting for other factors that could affect risk including smoking, coffee intake and history of head injury.

“It’s important to note that not everyone with low scores on the smell test will develop Parkinson’s disease,” Chen said. “More research is needed before the smell test can be used as a screening tool for Parkinson’s, but we are definitely on to something and our goal now is to better characterize populations that are at higher risk for the disease and to identify other factors involved.”

The National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Nursing Research and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences funded the study.

 

Article from Michigan State University.

Read more

Parkinson’s and malnutrition: what are the risks and how do you prevent it?

June 1, 2017 Caregivers, Education, Life

Parkinson’s is a complicated condition and while many people with Parkinson’s live a long and healthy life, this is not the case for everyone. A recent study found that possibly as many as 60% of people with Parkinson’s are at increased risk for malnutrition.1 “Increased risk” doesn’t mean that 60% of people with Parkinson’s will develop malnutrition, it just means that there is a higher possibility of malnutrition – but it is a good idea to be aware of all its possible causes, so that you can minimise the risk.

The risks and how to minimise them

Below are descriptions of some common nutrition-related concerns that may occur as a result of Parkinson’s, followed by suggestions that could help to resolve the problems.

Sense of smell
One of the first symptoms of Parkinson’s can be loss of the sense of smell, a sense that is necessary in order to taste food. While lack of taste and smell doesn’t always affect appetite, it can become a factor.

Suggestions: Choose favourite or especially desirable foods. Focus on flavour intensity – lemon, garlic, soy sauce, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, herbs; and “mouthfeel” – foods that are crunchy, creamy, chewy or have other appealing textures that make them more agreeable when scent and flavour are lacking.

Feeling nauseous
Medications used to treat Parkinson’s often cause nausea.

Suggestion: Ginger is very effective at counteracting nausea. Keep some fresh ginger in the freezer and use it to make ginger tea, or chew a slice of ginger. Keep a container of crystallised ginger handy, to take while on errands or travelling. Even powdered ginger can be used to make tea.

Medication regimes
Medications may cause loss of appetite.

Suggestion: Discuss this with your physician. If medication-induced, it may be possible to try a different medication.

Low mood
Depression is common among people with Parkinson’s and can affect willingness to eat.

Suggestion: Discuss this with your physician. Depression can be due to deficiency of B vitamins, vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, or other nutrients – a blood test will show whether this is the case and, if so, supplements should help. In some cases, depression can be alleviated by attending regular counselling sessions, however, some people may require antidepressant medication.

Late-stage Parkinson’s
The stage of Parkinson’s can be a factor, because as it progresses, symptoms often become more severe. In addition, motor fluctuations are more likely to occur in later-stage Parkinson’s. ‘Off’-time, dystonia, and dyskinesia can make it difficult both to eat, and to time medications and meals.

Suggestion: Ask your doctor about a longer-lasting medication, such as Stalevo, or Rytary, or a pump, so that ‘off’ time is reduced and the timing of medications and meals is more regulated closely.

Calorie deficit
Tremor and dyskinesia can burn extra calories.

Suggestions: If using levodopa, divide the day’s protein needs between morning, midday, and evening meals, taking levodopa about 30 minutes before each meal. In between meals, eat small, non-protein or low-protein snacks, such as fruits and juices, whole-grain crackers or biscuits, tomato or vegetable soup. These add extra calories without blocking levodopa absorption.

Swallowing and choking issues
Swallowing problems increase fear and risk of choking.

Suggestions: Ask your doctor for a referral to a speech pathologist, who can evaluate your swallowing function, and determine whether you are at risk for choking. If so, the therapist can demonstrate safe swallowing techniques, and recommend chopped, puréed, or otherwise altered foods and liquids. You should also be referred to a dietitian, who can assess your needs and ensure you are getting enough protein and other nutrients.

Motor problems in hands
Rigidity and loss of manual dexterity makes it hard to manage eating utensils.

Suggestion: Ask your doctor for a referral to an occupational therapist, who can recommend specially designed plates, bowls, drinkware, and eating utensils that are easier to manage.

Slowed eating
Chewing and swallowing become tiring, cause slowed eating and inability to finish meals. It may take several hours to finish one meal, so the person is unable to consume enough calories during a day to maintain health.

Suggestion: Choose foods that require little chewing. Include nutrient-rich blended smoothies, minced, mashed or pureed meats, fish, vegetables and fruits such as meatloaf, applesauce, mashed peas, potatoes, carrots, or baby foods. If this is insufficient, ask your doctor about placement of a feeding tube. In many cases, individuals can still eat and enjoy food by mouth; but the feeding tube ensures sufficient fluids to prevent dehydration, and enough protein, vitamins, and minerals for complete nutrition.

Seeking helpFor some people, Parkinson’s may present barriers to good nutrition. These can be difficult to deal with. Being aware of such possibilities is important, so that you can prepare as needed. That includes close communication with your neurologist, and the help of specialised health professionals, for their advice and support. With preparation and an experienced healthcare team, you can overcome, – or even prevent – common causes of malnutrition and related illness.

References
1Tomic S1, Pekic V2, Popijac Z3, Pucic T3, Petek M2, Kuric TG2, Misevic S3, Kramaric RP2. What increases the risk of malnutrition in Parkinson’s disease? J Neurol Sci. 2017 Apr 15;375:235-238.

Kathrynne Holden, a registered dietitian, has specialised in Parkinson’s disease nutrition for over 20 years. She has contributed to two physicians’ manuals on Parkinson’s, written the booklet ‘Nutrition Matters’ for the NPF (with some of her work for them archived here). Now retired, she maintains a website on Parkinson’s topics.

http://parkinsonslife.eu/parkinsons-and-malnutrition-risks-and-prevention/

Read more

Wisconsin Parkinson Association Mission

Our mission is to provide hope, community, support, and resources for people with Parkinson’s and their loved ones.

Contact

13400 Bishops Lane
Suite 120
Brookfield, WI 53005
414.312.6990
[email protected]
Follow Us On Facebook

View Our Annual Report

Click here to view Wisconsin Parkinson Association’s 2021-2022 Annual Report.

Search Our Site

Copyright Wisconsin Parkinson Association 2023