ELIZABETH PAYNE, OTTAWA CITIZEN
Ross Tuddenham, 77, who has Parkinsons, and his wife, Kim Teron, meet with University of Ottawa professor, Michael Schlossmacher at the Ottawa Hopsital's General.
It wasn’t until Ross Tuddenham’s watch stopped working that he began to accept something might be wrong with him.
Earlier, the 77 year old had been convinced it was a mistake when a doctor told him he had Parkinson’s disease. He had injured his hand and just thought it was taking awhile to heal. But then his perpetual motion watch — the kind that uses the body’s motion to wind itself — stopped running.
When the retired Ottawa businessman sent it for repair he was told there was nothing wrong with the watch. What was wrong turned out to be the lack of motion in Tuddenham’s increasingly rigid left arm — a symptom of Parkinson’s.
That story resonated with neurologist Dr. Michael Schlossmacher when he heard it the first time he met his new patient, Tuddenham.
Schlossmacher, a senior researcher at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of Ottawa, has built an award-winning career on both caring for patients like Tuddenham and looking at problems from unusual angles in an effort to work toward better treatment or a cure for the disease.
Tuddenham’s watch story, he said during a recent interview, was a “really interesting observation.”
Schlossmacher’s refusal to accept long-held beliefs just because they are widely accepted helped him pioneer the theory that Parkinson’s disease could be triggered by an infection decades before symptoms appear in most people. He is convinced that openness to new ideas will be key to finding better treatment and eventually a cure for the disease that affects 110,000 Canadians, including about 8,000 people in Ottawa.
The chronic and progressive movement disorder has no cure and treatment has progressed little in recent decades.
“We haven’t fixed anything for many years for Parkinson’s, so you have to be totally open to accepting that you are wrong with whatever ideas you push.”
Parkinson’s research, said Schlossmacher, is generally 10 years behind Alzheimer’s disease. In recent years, there has been a growing body of research suggesting that infection plays a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. It is a theory that was long discounted but is now gaining support in light of repeated failures to develop effective treatment or a cure based on the predominant theory that it is caused by plaques and tangles in the brain.
Research linking infection to Parkinson’s is not as far advanced, but work by Schlossmacher and colleagues including Dr. Julianna Tomlinson, is helping to move research forward that might lead to new ways of treating the disease.
“If the theory is correct, it would mean Parkinson’s could be triggered by an infection decades before motor symptoms actually develop,” Schlossmacher said. The theory suggests that some infections in the gut and the nose might cause the immune system to malfunction, leading to inflammation in the brain and damage of critical nerve cells. He notes that loss of smell and chronic constipation are associated with the disease, which might be linked to the infection theory.
“This would allow us to predict who may develop Parkinson’s in later years. It would also provide hope for new treatments for this still incurable disease,” he said.
Schlossmacher, who has three relatives with Parkinson’s, said he believes progress is coming in treating the disease “because people are more willing to look at alternative hypotheses and test them.”
He draws inspiration from the story of Nobel laureate Barry Marshall who battled accepted thinking to prove that peptic ulcers are caused by bacteria and can be cured with antibiotics. The researcher from Perth, Australia, even went so far as to swallow a Petri dish of H. pylori, which caused an ulcer he then cured with antibiotics. Even then, it took time for his findings to be widely accepted.
Schlossmacher acknowledges there are many hurdles to be overcome before there is a cure for Parkinson’s. Still, he says, “all you have to do is crack the door open and show something can be done that people thought couldn’t’ be done.”
For patients such as Tuddenham and his wife, Kim Teron, Schlossmacher’s open-minded view toward research gives them hope there will some day be a different reality for Parkinson’s patients. Equally important, says Teron, is his patient care, which helps Tuddenham and others live as well as they can with Parkinson’s.
“He is willing to change mid-stream to get to the end result and in the meantime to make life better for those living with Parkinson’s, which to me is as important as finding a cure.”
Schlossmacher will be awarded The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute’s Grimes Research Career Achievement Award later this month.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/thinking-outside-the-box-on-solving-the-parkinsons-puzzle
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