The number of people with Parkinson's in the world has doubled since 1990 and will double again by 2040, to nearly 13 million.
"If you're having an exponential rise in a condition throughout the world, that's called a pandemic, and we haven't addressed it as such," says Ray Dorsey, MD, MBA, of the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York.
In our latest podcast Dorsey speaks with MJFF Contributing Editor Dave Iverson about the rise in Parkinson's and strategies to prevent its onset and address gaps in care. Dorsey looks to actions from the HIV/AIDS community in the 1980s that changed the trajectory of that disease.
"What led that advance wasn't great infectious disease doctors and it wasn't great science, although those were all important. It was the community that drove change," he says.
Hear more from Dorsey and his co-author on a recent paper on this topic, Bastiaan Bloem, MD, PhD, from Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, in our next Third Thursdays Webinar this week, Thursday, March 15 at 12 p.m. ET.
Subscribe to The Michael J. Fox Foundation Parkinson's Podcast in iTunes or your podcast mobile app. And please consider leaving a review on iTunes and sharing the series with your network.
