0000000000418698
AUTHOR
Madaline B. Harrison
To Be Continued: Serial Narration, Chronic Disease, and Disability.
This article explores the representation of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease in the television series The Good Wife and The Michael J. Fox Show. We suggest that serial narration offers intriguing ways to rethink the function and meaning of narratives in health contexts, and that the episodic narrative form of television series may afford insights into the structure of medical encounters. Specifically, we examine to what extent serial narration, with its focus on continuity and repetition, might help reimagine the typical narrative of decline, which is implicit in the terminology of neurodegeneration, as well as the narrative of (premature) closure or finitude that often accompanies a di…
The risky business of dopamine agonists in Parkinson disease and impulse control disorders
Risk-taking behavior is characterized by pursuit of reward in spite of potential negative consequences. Dopamine neurotransmission along the mesocorticolimbic pathway is a potential modulator of risk behavior. In patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), impulse control disorder (ICD) can result from dopaminergic medication use, particularly dopamine agonists (DAA). Behaviors associated with ICD include hypersexuality as well as compulsive gambling, shopping, and eating, and these behaviors are potentially linked to alterations to risk processing. Using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, we assessed the role of agonist therapy on risk-taking behavior in PD patients with (n = 22) and without (n =…