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Parkinson's & Movement disorders news

Neuroscience

New evidence about dopamine delivery explains why current Parkinson's treatments succeed—and their limitations

A McGill-led study is challenging a popular theory about how dopamine drives movement, a discovery that could shift how scientists think about Parkinson's disease treatments.

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

New ALS diagnostic blood test boasts 97% accuracy

ALS is a debilitating paralytic disease characterized as the death of upper and lower motor neurons. Fortunately, ALS is relatively rare, with an incidence rate of 1.6 per 100,000 adults, resulting in about 30,000 cases in ...

Neuroscience

Aging midbrain neurons face energy crisis linked to Parkinson's

Dopamine neurons in a part of the brain called the midbrain may, with aging, be increasingly susceptible to a vicious spiral of decline driven by fuel shortages, according to a study led by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Early Parkinson's predictor found in daily step count

Oxford's Big Data Institute and Nuffield Department of Population Health report that daily step counts may help identify who will later be diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, with lower activity patterns acting as an early ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

In-home sensor technology offers smarter care for ALS patients

Bill Janes is on a mission to improve life for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). As a licensed occupational therapist and researcher at the University of Missouri, he's seen firsthand how the disease can steal ...

Neuroscience

Brain markers could yield early clues into Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease affects more than 1.1 million people in the United States, progressively damaging the brain cells that control movement. By the time symptoms like tremors appear, patients have already lost around half ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Untreated sleep apnea raises risk of Parkinson's, study finds

New research reveals that people with untreated obstructive sleep apnea have a higher risk of developing Parkinson's disease. However, they can significantly reduce the risk by improving the quality of their sleep by using ...

Neuroscience

Pause and rewind: How the brain keeps time to control action

Whether speaking or swinging a bat, precise and adaptable timing of movement is essential for everyday behavior. Although we do not have sensory organs like eyes or a nose to sense time, we can keep time and control the timing ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Evidence builds for disrupted mitochondria as cause of Parkinson's

For decades, scientists have known that mitochondria, which produce energy inside our cells, malfunction in Parkinson's disease. But a critical question remained: do the failing mitochondria cause Parkinson's, or do they ...

Alzheimer's disease & dementia

What polymers can teach us about curing Alzheimer's disease

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have applied ideas from polymer physics to illuminate the mechanism behind a key pathology in Alzheimer's disease, the formation of fibrils of tau proteins. They showed that ...

Genetics

New genetic test targets elusive cause of rare movement disorder

Scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School have developed a targeted genetic test to improve diagnosis for X-linked dystonia-parkinsonism (XDP), a rare and disabling movement disorder that affects ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Exercise hormone halts Parkinson's disease symptoms in mouse study

Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston have shown that a hormone secreted into the blood during endurance, or aerobic, exercise reduces levels of a protein linked to Parkinson's ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Building momentum against Parkinson's

A team led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School has taken a step toward solving a central mystery of Parkinson's disease: What is the normal function of the protein whose misfolding causes ...

Neuroscience

Brain's support cells may hold key to new Huntington's treatments

Huntington's disease—a hereditary and fatal genetic disorder—has long been considered a neuronal disease due to the permanent loss of medium spiny motor neurons, the death of which over time is responsible for the clinical ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Is it Parkinson's? These 10 signs could tell

Parkinson's disease can be hard for the average person to identify, but 10 warning signs may offer an early clue that you or a loved one may be developing the disease.

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

A new wearable system tracks Parkinson's disease symptoms remotely

Parkinson's disease affects 10 million people worldwide and its symptoms include tremors in the fingers and hands, small handwriting, loss of smell, walking difficulties, dizziness, and others. As these symptoms worsen over ...

Neuroscience

Scientists zero in on genetic causes of Parkinson's

Variants of at least 20 different genes have been closely linked to the development of Parkinson's disease, but scientists are still investigating how exactly they cause the severe and incurable motor disorder that afflicts ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Spotting Parkinson's disease through AI

Tracking wearable sensors, filming the patients performing routine exercises, or examining their handwriting—which is better for Parkinson's detection? Researchers at Skoltech performed a comparative study of these three ...

Neuroscience

Copper leads to protein aggregation in Parkinson's disease

Copper exposure in the environment and the protein alpha-synuclein in the human brain could play an important role in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. A team from Empa and the University of Limerick was able to show ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

A new cause of Parkinson's disease-related cell death

There is currently no cure for Parkinson's disease (PD), and one of the main difficulties for developing treatments is that we don't know exactly how or why the disease occurs. It's generally believed that a buildup of Lewy ...