LAGOS JUNE 5TH (URHOBOTODAY)-Dr. Michael Okun, the chairman of the department of neurology at the University of Florida and medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation, said it is not simply a given that boxing caused Ali’s Parkinson’s.
It won’t be known for certain unless Ali’s brain is examined, and the family has not said whether it would donate his brain for research.
But Okun said there were four signs that suggest the Parkinson’s did not come as a result of the beatings he took in battles against legendary fighters such as Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Sonny Liston and Ken Norton.
“We have to be really careful about drawing conclusions without data, and the data you would need at this point to more definitively know would be tissue data,” he said.
Okun, though, said there are four striking things about Ali’s case that may suggest his Parkinson’s was inherited. Ali was diagnosed with it in 1984, when he was 42. He lived nearly half of his life with the disease.
Roach, who retired as a boxer in 1986, said he was 29 when he was diagnosed with it. Roach is 56 now.
Okun’s four points are:
• Ali’s Parkinson’s started on one side of his body.
• Ali responded to Dopamine as a treatment.
• It was slowly progressive.
• It began in his 30s and 40s.
“This has all the hallmarks of Parkinson disease, what we call idiopathic or ‘regular garden variety’ Parkinson disease,” Okun told Yahoo Sports on Saturday. “There are a lot of experts who have seen him over the years and a lot of this case behaves like Parkinson.”
Freddie Roach has battled Parkinson’s since being diagnosed with it at 29. (Getty)
Okun, though, was quick to point out that it’s not as if it’s likely that boxing didn’t have a role to play in Ali’s difficulties.
In the final two years of his career, Ali began to noticeably slur his words, and some reporters picked up on it as he was training to face Larry Holmes. He’d taken diuretics to help him lose weight, and so his body appeared to be in shape, even though he was nowhere ready to fight a man the caliber of Holmes.
Taking repeated blows to the head, whether while playing football or boxing, is never a good thing for the brain.
“Now certainly, when you get hit in the head that many times, it’s very clear that you can develop other neurological symptoms such as slurring of the speech and other things,” Okun said. “ … There is all of this worldwide debate, was it caused by all the blows and becoming punch drunk and probably everybody is a little bit right on this.
“It’s likely he had the genotype of Parkinson and maybe even a genetic form of Parkinson, because the majority of Parkinson presents in the 30s and 40s. We have Parkinson that presents in the teens and 20s and even earlier. … We now know many of these are genetic forms of Parkinson.”
Only 10 percent of Parkinson, Okun said, is known to be genetic.
The truth about the cause of Ali’s symptoms may never be known, but Roach knows one thing: Living with it is no fun.
“It’s a pain in the ass, to be honest with you,” Roach said. “The medication you take makes you feel [expletive]. A lot of times, you don’t take the medication because you don’t want to feel like that, you know? Some of the stronger medications, oh, Dopamine, for instance, is really, really hard to take. It can make you quite sick and so forth and you throw up and all that.
“I’ve had it long enough where I’m used to it now. My doctor bought me a timer that goes off every five hours so I make sure I take my medication. It’s important to take it on time because it works much better. But this is no fun to have, I’ll admit that.”
Yahoo Sport