{"id":185791,"date":"2014-08-14T18:48:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-14T23:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/14\/if-not-an-explanation-at-least-it-gives-us-some-context\/"},"modified":"2014-08-14T18:48:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-14T23:48:00","slug":"if-not-an-explanation-at-least-it-gives-us-some-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/14\/if-not-an-explanation-at-least-it-gives-us-some-context\/","title":{"rendered":"If Not an Explanation, At Least It Gives Us Some Context"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that Robin Williams was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/local\/lanow\/la-me-ln-robin-williams-parkinsons-20140814-story.html\">suffering from early stage Parkinson&#8217;s Disease<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Patients with Parkinson&#8217;s disease often suffer from depression, medical experts said Thursday, after Robin Williams&#8217; widow revealed that the comedian was in &#8220;early stages&#8221; of the neurological disease at the time of his apparent suicide.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The same biochemical changes in the brain that cause the hallmark physical symptoms of Parkinson&#8217;s &#8212; tremors, slowed movement, rigidity, balance loss &#8212; can also affect mood, said Dr. Jeff Bronstein, a neurologist in the Movement Disorder Program at UCLA. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;Obviously getting the diagnosis can make people depressed,&#8221; he said. &#8220;But we also know that there&#8217;s a much higher incidence of depression even before the disease is recognized. We think it&#8217;s one of the early symptoms.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think that anyone can truly understand what was going on in his head, but the fact his limbic system was being short circuited from a lack of dopamine was certainly a major contributing factor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that Robin Williams was suffering from early stage Parkinson&#8217;s Disease: Patients with Parkinson&#8217;s disease often suffer from depression, medical experts said Thursday, after Robin Williams&#8217; widow revealed that the comedian was in &#8220;early stages&#8221; of the neurological disease at the time of his apparent suicide.The same biochemical changes in the brain that &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1101,1065,1064,1074,1104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-entertainment","category-media","category-medical","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}