During Muhammad Ali’s boxing career, scores of people played armchair coach. He was Great because of his footwork, or because of his hand speed, they argued. Once both began to lose their fearsome grace, people stopped coaching and started diagnosing. He suffered Parkinson’s disease because of his boxing, the newly minted armchair neurologists said. Or, as his family has suggested, his disease was due to the exposure to pesticides he had experienced earlier in life. But the truth is that we may never know what caused his Parkinson’s—or that of the vast majority of those diagnosed. To argue otherwise is as speculative as asserting that Ali would surely have trounced a time-traveling Tyson.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder in which cells in a part of the brain that controls movement begin to die. As a result, patients slow down, lose coordination, and tremble. It is the second-most-common neurodegenerative disease, after Alzheimer’s, afflicting about 1 percent of the population older than 60 in developed countries.
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