![]() “The sooner you attack it, I think, the better chance you have to hold off the symptoms.” He shared his experience with the public “because I thought anybody who has any symptom, even if it's not one of the usual ones, could get a head start on dealing with the progressive nature of the disease,” he says. Those scans confirmed Alda's suspicion: he had Parkinson's. In James Parkinson's original description, “An Essay on the Shaking Palsy,” published in 1817, he wrote: “Tremulous motions of the limbs occur during sleep, and augment until they awaken the patient, and frequently with much agitation and alarm.” But despite similar reports over the next two centuries, the connection between dreams and disease remained obscure-so much so that Alda had to convince his neurologist to do a brain scan for Parkinson's after he read about the link in a 2015 news article. RBD is one of the strongest harbingers of future synucleinopathy, more predictive than other early markers such as chronic constipation and a diminished sense of smell.ĭescriptions of dream enactment by people with Parkinson's are as old as recognition of the disease itself. A third type of synucleinopathy, multiple system atrophy, interferes with both movement and involuntary functions such as digestion. ![]() Another is Lewy body dementia, in which small clusters of α-synuclein called Lewy bodies build up in the brain, disrupting movement and cognition. ![]() ![]() One of the most common RBD-linked ailments is Parkinson's disease, characterized mainly by progressive loss of motor control. It may also be the first sign of neurodegenerative disease, which on average shows up within 10 to 15 years after onset of the dream disorder. Some epidemiological studies suggest that enacted dreaming predicts a more than 80 percent chance of developing a neurodegenerative disease within the patient's lifetime. When RBD occurs in the absence of these alternative explanations, the chance of future disease is high. Nor is RBD always associated with a synucleinopathy: it can also be triggered by certain drugs such as antidepressants or caused by other underlying conditions such as narcolepsy or a brain stem tumor. This difference is clearly distinguishable in a sleep laboratory, where clinicians can monitor stages of sleep to see when a person moves. Sleepwalking and sleep talking, which occur more often during childhood and adolescence, take place during non-REM sleep. Apart from being hazardous to dreamers and their partners, RBD may foreshadow neurodegenerative disease, primarily synucleinopathies-conditions in which the protein α-synuclein (or alpha-synuclein) forms toxic clumps in the brain. Called RBD, for REM sleep behavior disorder, it affects an estimated 0.5 to 1.25 percent of the general population and is more commonly reported in older adults, particularly men. He was in his bedroom, having lurched out of sleep, and the sack of potatoes was a pillow he'd just chucked at his wife.Īcting out dreams marks a disorder that occurs during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep. So when he saw a bag of potatoes in front of him, he grabbed it and threw it at his attacker. This threat was real-or at least it felt that way. The actor, best known for his role on the television series M*A*S*H, wasn't on a set.
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