Last Thursday was World Parkinson’s Day. Regular readers will know I have the disease, and that’s why I did not celebrate the Day so much as mark it.
From my experience since being diagnosed in 2022, I can confirm that it is progressive and increasingly debilitating. Unlike Motor Neurone Disease that took the life of Doddie Weir, Parkinson’s is not fatal in itself but it can lead to dementia and there are other complications that can cause premature death.
I still don’t know what caused it and I suspect I never will. My grandfather had it, but the first question I was asked by the diagnosing consultant was ‘did you play rugby?’ Indeed I did and ignored several concussions to keep playing because there was no advice back then that you should take time away from playing and training to let the brain fully recover.
The ground-breaking Scottish-led research in 2022 which showed that former international rugby players were up to three times more likely to develop neurodegenerative diseases than the average male was truly scary.
Then in October last year, the brilliant Professor Willie Stewart at Glasgow University led teams from Glasgow, Boston and Sydney universities in the first major international study of a particular........