u/SupportVectorMachine

I was diagnosed with PD in February of this year following a mounting cascade of symptoms that I suspected early on were neurological in nature (olfactory disturbances [~10 years ago] → left shoulder pain [3 y.a.] → frozen shoulder [2.5 y.a.] → reduced arm swing [2 y.a] → occasional action tremor [1.75 y.a] → gait dysfunction [1.5 y.a.]).

The gait issues started as a limp and a weird stiff, achy feeling that would move around my lower body. Then came the hard-to-describe sense of my brain not communicating with my legs, like I had just borrowed this body and hadn't fully learned to use it. I started taking levodopa (as Madopar) in April of this year. Around that time I started experiencing a frequent and profound sense of weakness and heaviness in my legs, like you might get after a particularly intense leg day at the gym. Walking has become much more effortful, both physically and mentally. Naturally, I am concerned to see this level of dysfunction develop in a relatively short amount of time.

However, I have observed a few things that I think are interesting:

1. Despite the feeling of weakness, my actual, measurable leg strength is not diminished. (This has also been observed in other people with PD [1].)
2. The dysfunction tends to improve—sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot—as I make my way through my treadmill routine, which is currently made up of alternating intervals at 4.5 and 6.5 km/h at a two percent grade.
3. The dysfunction appears to be limited to "vanilla" walking on flat terrain:
   • Walking up or down stairs (a constrained problem) remains easy. Going from stairs to flat terrain sometimes temporarily improves my flat-terrain walking.
   • Walking backward is easier than walking forward, and I don't get that sense of weakness or heaviness.
   • If I transition to a jogging gait, the dysfunction and weakness immediately disappear.
   • If I put a little "swagger" in my step—a little bounce or other physical exaggeration—the dysfunction and weakness immediately disappear, even at my "vanilla" walking speed. The dysfunction reappears as soon as I resume my default walking gait.

As a cognitive scientist, I find these observations fascinating for what they suggest may be happening in the brain. As a person with PD, I find them encouraging for letting me know that not everything I am experiencing is a clear sign of ineluctable decline.

[1] Alonso-Juarez, M., Fekete, R., & Baizabal-Carvallo, J. F. (2022). Objective and self-perceived lower limb weakness in Parkinson’s disease. Therapeutic advances in neurological disorders, 15, 17562864221136903

I am recently diagnosed (50M) after several years of mounting symptoms (in this order: left shoulder pain and freezing, reduced left arm swing, action and postural tremor, gait dysfunction). I have been on levodopa for a bit over a month and am still tinkering with the dosage and timing (current LED 440 mg/day), having not yet found my sweet spot.

PD has some classic gait symptoms, such as reduced stride length, shuffling, festination, and freezing. I don't have any of that. Instead, I have an increasingly pronounced limp, a sense of "disconnect" between my brain and legs, and a frequent sense of heaviness and weakness in my legs. (Think of the "jelly legs" you get after a big leg workout.) These symptoms seem to be more pronounced during peak-dose times, especially after larger doses of levodopa, but I haven't yet firmly established that.

My question is whether this is familiar to any of you, especially those of you relatively early on in the disease.