Michael J. Fox Losing ‘Heartbreaking’ Fight Against Parkinson’s Disease [View all]

[Sunlei]

In 1982, a struggling young Canadian-born actor named Michael J. Fox achieved his big breakthrough when he began a run portraying Alex P. Keaton, the conservative son of decidedly liberal parents Steven and Elyse Keaton, on the hit NBC sitcom Family Ties — a role for which he garnered three consecutive Emmy awards as Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. A few years later, he leveraged that break into international stardom when he was cast (as a replacement for actor Eric Stoltz) to play Marty McFly, the lead character in the hugely popular 1985 adventure-comedy film Back to the Future.

In 1991, however, when Fox was barely 30 and at the peak of his success, he sought medical treatment for a twitch in his finger, and the following year he received the devastating diagnosis of young-onset Parkinson’s disease (PD), a progressive disorder of the nervous system that affects movement and is typically symptomized by involuntarily body movements and debilitating tremors (and is usually seen in people over the age of 60). Fox gamely concealed his condition while he continued working (primarily playing Mike Flaherty, the fictional Deputy Mayor of New York, in the ABC sitcom Spin City), but in 1998 he finally went public with the announcement that he was suffering from the disease and embarked upon a second career as a spokesperson and activist for Parkinson's research.

Despite his condition, Fox has soldiered on with his acting career, most recently starring as Mike Henry in NBC's The Michael J. Fox Show portraying a newscaster with Parkinson's who retires from work, and also playing a recurring role on the CBS drama The Good Wife as Louis Canning, an opposing counsel who suffers from tardive dyskinesia (involuntary visual tremors) and often uses his condition to his advantage by repeatedly calling attention to it in order to elicit sympathy during court appearances.

Some medications (or even brain surgery, which Fox underwent in 1998), can provide relief from PD symptoms, but they cannot completely check the progression of the disease. It's possible that in the not-too-distant future Michael J. Fox will, as Radar Online implied, lose the ability to walk on his own and require the use of a wheelchair and/or face the onset of dementia. But many different factors affect the timing and nature of PD's progression, and so it's impossible to predict exactly how and when any given individual will experience certain aspects of that progression.


Fox said he typically wakes up shaking uncontrollably, joking that he brushes his teeth with an electric toothbrush even though he doesn't own one.

http://www.snopes.com/2016/04/10/michael-j-fox-parkinsons/