This is Dr.Baikuntha, Assistant Professor in Neurology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Deoghar, Jharkhand, India. I am a young and budding clinician-scientist with special interest in non-motor symptoms of PD esp. cognition.
It is such a pleasure to be a part of this vibrant community and connect with some of the brightest minds working towards a common goal of defeating PD.
I would love to hear about how to proceed with the ipsc PD models in the PPMI database and explore them for uncovering novel pathways leading to downstream synucleinopathies with cognitive involvement vs those without.
I also a R enthusiast and any interesting libraries for data analysis and visualisation are always welcome!
Once again thanks a lot for making me a part of this great initiative!
welcome aboard Baikuntha! we have many cognition researchers amongst us including myself! i work mainly on Lewy body dementia including Parkinson’s disease dementia & dementia with Lewy bodies, so it’s always exciting to see a new face in the team
Great to know that we have shared research interests…
PDD and DLB work is always exciting. We can make a great team. Would be happy to know if you are interested in the PPMI iPSC datasets and have any links for any introductory video on using IPSC dataset of PPMI.
We would love to have you join the Data Modality and Methodology Task Force if you are able. We have a meeting coming up in a couple of weeks. @gginnan can send an invite.
I do a lot of R analysis; always happy to talk about data analysis and visualization. You might also be interested in the visual resource generation task force.
I would love to join both the Data Modality and Methodology Task Force as well as the Visual Resource generation and would be interesting to learn about any new visualisation libraries in R from you!
I use a the Hindi Version of the MMSE(Has 31 pts max) for screening.
The Hindi ACE-III and MoCA for Literates for detailed assessment (I often do this after routine OPDs as it is tedious to explain even in literates and needs to be explained to my patients carefully)
For illiterates, I use the MUDRA(Multilingual Dementia Research and Assessment) toolbox which is developed by the ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research)-basically a hindi adapted version of the TNI(Test des Neuf Images)-93.
Still I find that cultural adaptation is essential as assessing cognition in a patient who goes to the forest to cut woods daily needs to be adapted individually to for example the trees, the tools, addition and calculation of trees or number of tools. A lady who cooks daily is excellent at measuring the amount of masala that needs to be put in the curry but may perform poorly at general ACE/MoCA tests. But obviously then standardisation is an issue.
I can share with you the tools I use in my OPD.
Thanks for that beautiful question! and would love to hear from you too….
