Parkinson's Disease has plagued the human race for millennia. In fact, historians have found evidence of the Parkinson's Disease going back as far as 5,000 B.C.

The symptoms of Parkinson's Disease were first formally described in 1817 by James Parkinson, a British physician, in his paper An Essay on the Shaking Palsy. Because of Parkinson's pioneering work in identifying symptoms, the disease came to bear his name.

Dr. Parkinson described a puzzling set of symptoms that he found in some of his older patients, which he described as a pronounced trembling and an increasing sense of weakness. The disease is sometimes known as paralysis agitans, which translated from Latin means shaking palsy.

Almost 200 years later, doctors have a much clearer idea of the underlying pathology of Parkinson's. Parkinson's Disease is a syndrome rather than a single disease, which means that the disease has several causes instead of a single cause.

Today, most neurologists agree that Parkinson's Disease is due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors. However, these largely remain to be identified and further research is required.