Hello, DCoP members! I hope your 2025 is off to a good start. We’re creating a new Topic where you all can share the work you’ve been doing, including papers or pre-prints you’ve written or been involved with, or talks you’ve given. Please use this thread to add links to any relevant articles that you have written recently, or to link to slides and/or recordings of your conference presentations.
Additionally, we encourage you to share what funding you are applying for and/or what grant programs you are aware of which will be opening/closing soon. Whether these programs are listed in @danieltds 's recent post “Grant providers for neurodegenerative disease research” or fall outside that list, other community members may find it helpful to hear how you and your colleagues are navigating the funding landscape.
We love hearing what you’re working on, and sharing your projects can be a great way to make connections or foster new collaborations. Thanks to everyone who shared on the Q4 2024 Topic – it’s very cool to see the breadth of topics that you’re focusing on.
Really looking forward to seeing your work and hearing your input!
I’d like to share one of my most recent articles! It is currently on pre-print (link) but was recently accepted for publication in the Lancet Regional Health Americas. I’m really happy for this paper because I think it provides a very relevant type of information and because, for the first time, I’m one of the last authors and was the one that had the idea of study and how to conduct it.
Epidemiological data on PD are severely lacking in low to middle-upper income countries such as Brazil, which makes it more difficult for the planning of health initiatives focused on prevention, diagnosis and treatment. This paper used data from a big door-to-door survey conducted in Brazil (> 9000 individuals) that is representative of all regions and socioeconomical levels of the country. By using this data, we were able to estimate the prevalence of PD for the first time in a country-wide manner.
But now comes the most interesting part: we were able to also estimate the trajectory of PD progression in Brazil up until 2060 by using estimates based on population aging alone, and our results show that PD prevalence will increase significantly and will become significant health burden to families and society, as represented in the graph below (taken from the pre-print).
Dear Daniel, fantastic work! I’ll definitely use some of this data for the upcoming Brazilian Congress of Neurogenetics in March. I’ll be presenting a talk on the genetics of Parkinson’s disease in São Paulo, and I’m sure your manuscript will be of great interest to the audience. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for creating this space to share our work. I’d like to contribute my recent pre-print, which builds on data provided by the Michael J. Fox Foundation. The study, titled “Nonclinical Preventive Measures of Parkinson’s Disease (PD): Identifying Key Lifestyle, Demographic, and Environmental Factors,” highlights important modifiable factors for PD prevention and suggests areas for further research, particularly in understanding the complex interactions among lifestyle factors, environmental exposures, and disease onset.
Dear colleagues,
I am new to the community here - I run a team who look at sleep and circadian rhythms as relates to health and wellbeing. We recently published an analysis of data in the Fox Insights study on self-reported sleep problems in PD: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14453.
We report sleep problems are very highly prevalent (~85% of PD patients endorse poor sleep, twice the rate for matched controls), and sleep problems are linked with greater depression, more problems of independent living, poorer quality of life and more OFF periods. About 7% of respondents endorsed sleep as their most bothersome PD symptom, but our analysis leads us to suspect that these participants have less severe motor and other non-motor symptoms, and as such the relative ranking of their sleep complaints in higher. The nature of the sleep problems endorsed are most commonly of non-specific insomnia-type problems of sleep initiation and/or maintenance and excessive day time sleepiness, with less indications for sleep apnea (although these are all from self-report). Hopefully these findings may be of interest to the community,
Thank you @danieltds for creating this Topic. I have enjoyed reading the work of other community members. I also wanted to share some relatively new research from our group here at Boston University related to TBI and parkinsonism. Here is a manuscript that we published last year: Substantia Nigra Pathology, Contact Sports Play, and Parkinsonism in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy - PubMed. I thought it would be of interest to this community. The goal of the study was to examine the frequency of parkinsonism among individuals with autopsy-confirmed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) as well as to test the association between participation in contact sports (as a marker for exposure to repetitive TBIs) and parkinsonism and identify the pathological predictors of parkinsonism in this setting. The take home findings were: (1) exposure to contact sports was associated with tau pathology and neuronal loss in the substantia nigra, and (2) tau and neuronal loss in this region were associated with Parkinsonism. Lewy bodies also contributed to Parkinsonism but were not associated with our proxies of repetitive TBIs.
Study highlights the mediating role of tau in the association between contact sport exposure and parkinsonism. The mechanisms by which TBI might precipitate parkinsonism could be distinct. We intend to explore additional funding to better characterize the association between TBI and parkinsonism in aging individuals exposed to head trauma including using fluid biomarkers to detect aberrant alpha-synuclein.
