Alan Alda may have played an army guy on screen, but the 82-year-old is tough in real life too.
The West Wing star appeared on CBS This Morning where he revealed that he has been living with Parkinson’s Disease.
The illness affects the body’s central nervous system and can result in shaking and other physical difficulties.
Alda was diagnosed three and a half years ago and had not begun to show symptoms before he asked for a scan.
The actor says he had read an article which claimed that acting out your dreams could be an early sign of the disease, and a few months later noticed a twitch in his thumb.
But Alda is not letting any of this get him down.
“I’ve had a full life since then,” he said. “I’ve acted, I’ve given talks, I help at the Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook. I started this new podcast. And I noticed that — I had been on television a lot in the last couple of weeks talking about the new podcast — and I could see my thumb twitch in some shots and I thought, ‘It’s probably only a matter of time before somebody does a story about this from a sad point of view, but that’s not where I am.’”
The octogenarian also takes boxing lessons three times a week and plays single tennis matches.
We’re with you Alda way, Alan!
