Finnish study: Smoking and drinking coffee might prevent Parkinson's disease

My dad has submitted data to 23andMe as well, but unfortunately it didn't come with a free account. It was a special thing they were doing to collect Parkinson's data. So I have no idea if he has the markers.

https://www.michaeljfox.org

30-40 years is a lot of time for research.

Andy Grove is another famous person with the disease who's working hard to find treatments:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0128/070.html

"What neuropathy is, is your nerve cells are starting to die. And it can occur in different places with different symptoms depending on what cells are dying. Things like, for example, Alzheimers is an obvious example of nerve cell death. Things like ALS. Things like Parkinsons disease. These are just all different formats, different disease states, that result from nerves dying. And our endocannabinoid system plays a very unique role in trying to protect us from various kinds of nerve cell death.

So what's going on with the endocannabinoid system is that it's something that protects our nerves in general. It helps promote nerve growth and nerve health, and rewiring of your brain. You know, adults up until the fairly recent past, it was believed that we no longer had the capacity to regenerate nerves. And what we now know is that we do have that capacity, but furthermore what we know is that nerve regeneration in the brain is very much regulated by these marijuana-like compounds, these endocannabinoids. So we have a whole host of very important activities, the direct protection of nerves from dying, the promotion of regeneration, the promotion of learning, of re-learning things, is a very important biological effect of our endocannabinoid system.

So what are the kinds of things we can do to try and promote health in these areas? On the one hand, everybody should make sure they take in enough essential fatty acids. And certainly I would say one of the best sources for that is we should be consuming hemp oil. And the reason I say hemp oil as opposed to fish oil is because you can ensure organic hemp oil is not contaminated with things like mercury. And that's going to allow our bodies to make our endocannabinoids.

We often hear about the beneficial effects of things like Omega-3s and Omega-6s, and at least some of the attributes of those compounds are the result of them being converted into endocannabinoids. So at least that way your body can do what your body can do. You're giving it the tools to make the things that you need. But in many cases, that's not sufficient, and we have to supplement beyond what our body can make. And there's only one plant on the planet that has the capacity to mimic the way our body works with these endocannabinoids, and that's marijuana.

So marijuana actually directly mimics these particular compounds, and as a result, it has these strong neuroprotectant effects. But because marijuana and these endocannabinoids, their activities are so pervasive in our bodies, they literally regulate every system in your body, your immune system, digestive system, reproductive system, cardiovascular system. Everything in your body is homeostatically maintained by endocannabinoids, meaning balance. They're how our body tries to balance how we interact with the environment when our environment becomes stressful for us, stressful psychologically, stressful biochemically. So these are very, very critical compounds and the use of cannabis can have a profound effect in terms of helping to stop nerve cell degeneration, helping restore functional nerves, helping restore new ways of thinking. And this is just really touching on the surface of the humongous number of benefits that this plant can have for so many different illnesses.

... and what our cannabinoids system is evolved to do over many hundreds of millions of years has been to protect us from those kinds of inbalances. To restore the kind of health that we need. And because of our environment, in particular because we are living longer, we need to be able to adapt very rapidly today, and we can't do that on an evolutionary scale. The way for us to do that as people, as intelligent people, is to make sure we're eating good diets, stay away from toxins, and eat these essential fatty acids, and when necessary, consume cannabinoids."

- Dr. Bob Melamed, Ph.D., UC Colorado Springs

http://www.uccs.edu/rmelamed/endocannabinoids-and-medical-ma...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeeVBSERb-c

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5yxaVksbY