Active clinical trials for "Parkinson Disease"

The purpose of this study is to investigate how changes in the brain associated with Parkinson's disease influence the control of motor and thinking speed. There is disagreement over whether patients with Parkinson's disease are slow in thinking as well as movement. This study may provide a new framework to explain the relationship between motor and cognitive aspects of human behavior and help to clarify the pathophysiology of Parkinson's disease. There are two parts to the study: behavioral tests and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). All participants will be asked about their medical history, have a physical examination, and complete a questionnaire. They must not take regular medications, including levodopa and dopamine agonists, for 8 hours prior to the study. The behavioral study involves computer-generated neuropsychological tasks, including hand movements, imagination of movements, and mental calculations. Response will be recorded and evaluated. Electrodes may be placed on the participant's skin to measure surface electromyogram (EMG). The fMRI study involves MRI scanning in which motor and thinking tasks are performed. Electrodes may be placed on the skin to monitor muscle activity. Thirty patients, ages 40 and up, with early-stage Parkinson's disease will be recruited. Sixty normal volunteers ages 21-75 will be included as well for comparison.

The goal of the clinical trial aim in this project is to test whether catechol thioethers can be used as biomarkers of dopaminergic neurodegeneration.

The purposes of this study are to identify the gene or genes responsible for an inherited form of Parkinson's disease and learn more about how the disease develops. In Parkinson's disease, a deficiency of a brain chemical called dopamine impairs the function of the part of the brain that controls movement. As a result, patients may have difficulty moving or they may have uncontrolled movements of their hands and fingers. Parkinson's disease usually occurs sporadically, with no known cause. In a few families, however, the disease seems to be inherited through a gene mutation (change). There is a 50-50 chance that a parent with the mutated gene will pass it on to a child. Children who do inherit the abnormal gene may or may not go on to actually develop Parkinson's disease-the relative chance of this happening is not known. Individuals 18 years of age and older from families in which Parkinson's disease appears to be inherited may be eligible for this study. Participants will have their medical records reviewed, provide a personal and family medical history (by telephone or in person), and have a small blood sample (2 tablespoons) taken for genetic studies. The total time required for the study is about 1 to 2 hours. Participants are encouraged to meet with a NIH investigator or with a genetics specialist in their local area before testing to talk about the possible implications for themselves and their families of the test results....

People sometimes report that their relatives who have been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease (PD) have a unique smell. A previous study has demonstrated that PD patients do have smell that is different from that of healthy people. Sniffer dogs have long been used to identify criminals, and recently been used to identify subject with cancer. The investigators hypothesized that sniffer dogs may be able to identify PD patients.

The goal of this study is to identify reliable markers of LRRK2 activity in human CSF.

This Expanded Access IND is to evaluate the safety of multiple intravenous administrations of HB-adMSCs for treating Parkinson's disease in 10 patients between 76 and 95 y/o who do not qualify for other investigations.The dose to use for this expanded access is 200 million HB-adMSCs, administered through intravenous infusion only, with a treatment duration of 18 weeks. The program includes an up to 28 days screening period, an 18-week Treatment Period, and a 6-week Safety Follow-up Period.

This study aim to evaluate the correlation between Quality of Life (QoL) and severity of Parkinson's Disease (PD) by assessing the presence of an optimal cut-off point on the Parkinson's disease questionnaire (PDQ-39) as related to the Hoehn & Yahr (H&Y) scale in a cohort of Italian adults with PD. A multicenter, cross-sectional study was performed in central and northern Italy. This study was conducted on a cohort of consecutive individuals at three neurologic outpatient clinics. All participants were evaluated with the PDQ-39, and the severity of PD was recorded according to the H&Y scale by a neurologist. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and coordinates of the curve, which were visually inspected, were used to find cut-off points with optimal sensitivity and specificity. These were in turn used to determine the optimal PDQ-39 cut-off score for identifying disease severity according to H&Y stages.

The primary objective of the study is to evaluate the feasibility of eliciting continuous narrative speech in different neurodegenerative and psychiatric indications, using remote, self-administered speech tasks, as measured by the average length of speech elicitation for each speech task during the first week of self-assessment. Secondary objectives include (1) evaluating the reliability of speech tasks in the remote self-administered setting, as measured by the intra- and inter-subject variance; (2) accessing the adherence of speech tasks in this setting, as measured by the subject average fraction of days during the first week, where at least one task response is submitted; (3) evaluating the feasibility of using speech tasks in the setting of a telemedicine videoconference, as measured by the average length of speech elicited in each group; (4) evaluate whether a set of acoustic and linguistic patterns can detect each indication, compare to either a control group or all other indications, as measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity and Cohen's kappa of the relevant binary classifier; (5) evaluating how the performance of such algorithms can be impacted by speaker and environment covariates, as measured by the Kendall rank correlation coefficient of the AUC of each classifier and each of age group, gender and speech-to-reverberation modulation energy ratio.

Introduction: Parkinson's disease (PD) is the association of tremor, rigidity, akinesia-bradykinesia and loss of postural reflexes. Non-motor symptoms such as cognitive impairment may also develop. Cognitive impairment can be highly variable in its progression, symptoms and severity and can begin from the onset of the disease to the most advanced stages. Frailty is a syndrome characterized by a decrease in physiological reserve that results in an individual's increased vulnerability, which can lead to a variety of adverse factors when exposed to stressors. PD and frailty are highly prevalent in older people and are associated with increased morbidity and mortality. The presence of frailty in patients with PD is poorly studied, as is the association between cognitive impairment and frailty in this patient profile. Objective: Evaluate the relationship between frailty and cognitive impairment in patients with PD or secondary parkinsonism. Study design: observational, descriptive, correlative and cross-sectional. Study population: The subjects that will be part of this study will be men and women with a diagnosis of PD or secondary parkinsonism belonging to the Health Area V of the Health Service of the Principality of Asturias, Spain.

The AETIONOMY project will generate a refined taxonomy and testable mechanisms underlying the derived stratification of patients.