I was watching the film Awakenings (yes, I know, this isn’t Cafe Society but this is just a quick technical question that search engines haven’t helped me resolve) and in the movie Robert De Niro suffers from a degenerative brain condition. I cannot for the life of me think what it is called and as I take an amateur interest in such things, this makes researching it rather difficult. I can only recall two things about it.
It began with an E.
It was described by Robin Williams character as a sort of highly advanced type of Parkinsons Disease which was apparently treated successfully for a short while with a substance called L-DOPA.
According to the plot summary at IMDb, the patients in Awakenings were victims of an earlier outbreak of encephalitis. This may be what you are thinking of when you say “It began with an E.”
L-DOPA is the chemical dopamine (neurotransmitter) is synthesised from, and is used to replenish dopamine in the substantia nigra and basal ganglia. The degeneration of these mid brain structures and resultant reduction of dopamine production leads to Parkinsons disease. L-DOPA is usually only effective for a short period and becomes less effective over time
I have no idea what the ‘E’ might relate to, other than encephalitis.
According to the website of the movie’s director, Penny Marshall, the disease was “post-encephalitis sleep disorder.”
The Rotten Tomatoes website says this about the movie and the doctor played by Robin Williams: “A pioneering neurologist wants to take a risk and give his patients who suffer from encephalitis a drug used for Parkinson’s Disease.”
Here’s more info. This is a site where you’ll see De Niro’s disease referred to as encephalitis lethargia. I just skimmed this site looking for specific words and in no way vouch for it’s accuracy.
Here’s another website that mentions encephalitis lethargia–it’s about Dr. Sack and his book, on which the movie Awakenings is based.
And on preview I see that I gave more info than I meant and also that it’s now somewhat redundant. But I’ll hit Submit anyway because it was hard for me to find websites that contained references to both the movie and “encephalitis lethargia,” and because technical difficulties on this end have made this an amazingly difficult message to write and post. Cable ain’t always faster and Google most certainly is not always your friend.
As others have said. Best move is to read the Sacks’ book, also called Awakenings (you’ll find it on Amazon, and Sacks has his own website). The illness has various names - “Von Economo’s disease”, “encephalitis lethargica”, “European sleepy sickness”. It damaged dopamine-producing regions of the brain. Awakenings concerned people who had survived the acute early 20th century outbreak, but gone into ‘frozen’ states as a sequel, and were temporarily revived decades later by the administration of L-dopamine.
