Comment by thenerdhead
2 years ago
Very interesting. I recently watched the Michael J. Fox documentary(Still) and even he commented on an earlier infection as a teen "could've" been linked to his condition, but we'll never know.
Also having gone through two extended bouts of long covid now, I think it reactivated a family history of rheumatoid arthritis in me temporarily although I've never formally been diagnosed with it or struggled with it.
We're all just walking balls of disease causing germs eh?
The thing with Fox is that there were four people on the same TV or movie set that all wound up years later ill with Parkinson's.
But it's such a rare illness that most people who have it won't have ever met someone else with it before they got sick. For four people who all worked together to have it, it's a statistical anomaly if the disease is purely by chance.
Wow TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_and_Me#Parkinson's_disease
> When asked about the cluster by Howard Stern in a September 25, 2013, interview on The Howard Stern Show, Michael J. Fox stated, "Believe it or not, from a scientific point of view, that's not significant."
I thought Fox wasn't being accurate, but if you do the math on that, he's not wrong.
Parkinson's hits about 1 in 300 (0.33%), and that cast saw 4 out of 125 (3.2%). That sounds like it's a crazy amount more, but if you pop those numbers into an A/B test calculator, it's borderline whether you consider it significant or not, because the small sample size really reduces the statistical power.
It's definitely interesting but it's not wrong to say that it isn't significant by some statistical measures.
There's a lot of weird disease stuff going on. There was an article on how schizophrenia is linked to some multi million year old retrovirus that hangs out in our genome.
Been a while since my reading on the subject, but maternal flu infection during pregnancy has been linked to development of schizophrenia, too.