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" Parkinson's also affects the mind, sad but true."

Not exactly true... The classical Parkinson’s disease normally does not affect reasoning or memory. The condition is referred to as Parkinson’s syndrome though, because there can be a number of causes for it. The causes range from unknown, to genetic, to several viral infections, to drug abuse to environmental causes and heavy metal poisonings.

If you are talking about classical Parkinson’s disease that old people get (like the pope) it affects neither memory nor judgment. Of course, old people often have memory and judgment problems, but the Parkinson’s disease does not cause them, they just manifest themselves at the same time.

Actually, even the motor functions that are affected by Parkinson’s disease are fairly narrow. For instance, a Parkinson’s patient who can not walk, can often run very smoothly, and often can ride a bike with perfect balance.

Frying your brain with drugs can cause both Parkinson’s symptoms and loss of memory / judgment. (Of course if you had any judgment in the first place, you’d not have used the drugs.)

Parkinson’s symptoms specifically are caused by a deficiency of a chemical in the brain called dopamine. The primary treatment is administrating carbidopa/levodopa orally as often as every two hours. It works really well for about the first five years of treatment, and then most patients develop a side effect to the medication call dyskinesias. This side effect can be almost as debilitating as Parkinson’s. Dyskinesias is involuntary jerky movements of the arms or legs.

My knowledge of this subject is from my experiences as a caregiver for my wife, who has had this disease for 40 years, and going to thousands of Parkinson’s support group meetings.

To those of you who think Parkinson’s means diminished mental abilities, my wife has a patent pending on an electronic stimulator device for the treatment of Dyskinesias. She’s sharp as a tack…

I am sorry about your wife, but I am glad that she is mentally sharp.

However, some fraction of Parkinson's disease sufferers, as the get older, do develop dementia, and of course some don't, but it appears that as the disease progresses, more and more do.

http://www.parkinson.org/pddement.htm

"Dementia, a global decline in intellect, is among the most feared complications of Parkinson disease. The behavioral consequences of dementia can be painfully obvious. Patients may be confused, disoriented, unable to be left alone. They may be agitated, delusional, moody, and disinhibited. They usually can't sleep at night, and can't stay awake during the day."