Jo-Anne Lazarus was washing her hair when she noticed something odd: Her right hand was moving in circles but her left hand wasn’t. Later, she had trouble getting keys out of her left pocket. She saw a doctor and got a diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease. The condition gradually slows movement, makes muscles rigid and causes tremors, usually leading to severe disability.Unlike most of the 500,000 to 1 million Americans with Parkinson’s, Lazarus didn’t need to read up on the disease. A UW-Madison associate professor of kinesiology, the study of movement, she had been researching Parkinson’s long before she learned she had it.
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