As you get older, three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.

Norman Wisdom

Does this happen to you? You read something interesting on your computer. You try to find it later and can’t remember where you saw it. Now it is nowhere to be found. It could have been a week ago or 5 minutes ago. No, it was not a Parkinson’s hallucintation, it was really there.

This morning, I read an article somewhere that people with Parkinson’s Disease tend to have fewer colds than people with other brain diseases. I looked through all of my read emails and could not find it. A Google search found an article from December 6, 2022, about a study “Are patients with Parkinson’s disease at a lower risk of catching the common cold? Propensity score matching, that was published by Parkinson’s News Today. (more on this below)

That’s great, but what did I read this morning and why can’t I find it now??????

When things like this happen, it is easy to think that maybe you are having some cognitive decline. After 14+ years of living with PD, I often wonder if this is happening to me. Most of the time I think I am fine cognitively. Mr. Twitchy may think differently. (I am afraid to ask). I think that information overload may often be the culprit. There is too much info on the internet and it is so easy to get drawn into exploring everything there is on any topic. In addition, I think that my anxiety increases when I am working on the computer, creating some mental fuzziness and difficulty typing. That means it is break time for me right now!

I am baaaack…….I did my stretching exercises, checked my vegetable garden which has gone crazy with all of the rain we have had, and a few other things. Now I am ready to tackle the computer once again. Hopefully the fuzziness is gone.

The Common Cold and Parkinsons’ Disease

I thought this was an interesting article from Parkinsonism & Related Disorders December issue. Apparently it was posted on today’s Parkinson’s News Today.

According to the article, “People with Parkinson’s appear to have more brain inflammation than those without the disease, which is thought to contribute to its development and progression. But inflammation can call on immune cells for protection, which has led a team of researchers in Japan to speculate that people with Parkinson’s may be kept safe from mild infections such as the common cold, at least while the disease is at its early stages.”

“After adjusting for potential influencing factors, such as age, sex, specific disease, and periods of before or after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers found that a Parkinson’s diagnosis reduced the odds of catching the common cold by about 70%. The pandemic period was also associated with a 50% less chance of reports of the common cold.”

I also noticed, that during the Pandemic (which officially ended yesterday in California!), no one got sick. No colds. No flu. My doctor agreed with me. While we were isolating ourselves, we did not catch colds. But now that most people are back to work, school and other activities, we are getting colds again. I am now nursing my second cold in a month. Of course, the weather in Los Angeles this winter has been colder than I ever remember since moving here 40+ years ago. And it has been wetter than any in recent memory. So now, everything is blooming and allergies may be at fault.

I hope that the authors are right and maybe this will be the last cold I get this year.

Stay dry, warm and feel good! Spring is just 3 weeks away.