News

A Phase 3 clinical trial of Annovis Bio‘s investigational oral treatment buntanetap in people with early-stage Parkinson’s disease now will open to patients in Europe. This expansion will add 48 new trial sites in Italy, Spain, Hungary, Poland and Germany, joining about 50 sites actively recruiting in the U.S.

Mindfulness meditation — a mental training of being focused on the present moment without interpretation or judgment — was better than physical exercise at lessening depression symptoms and maintaining emotional stability in people with mild-to-moderate Parkinson’s disease. That’s according to data from a small clinical trial conducted in Hong…

AC Immune has been awarded two research grants to identify the presence of TDP-43, a protein that plays a key role in neurodegeneration underlying Parkinson’s disease and other neurological diseases. The grants were awarded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) and Target…

Dosing has begun in a Phase 1 clinical trial of healthy volunteers to evaluate the safety and pharmacological properties of NEU-723, Neuron23’s oral investigational treatment for Parkinson’s disease. The small molecule candidate therapy is designed to block LRRK2, an enzyme coded by a gene of the same name whose…

People with REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), a sleep disturbance that can precede Parkinson’s disease, have higher levels of toxic alpha-synuclein protein clumps in their stool than do Parkinson’s patients and healthy people, a study showed. Alpha-synuclein aggregates, toxic to cells, are thought to contribute to Parkinson’s and other…

Microglia — the brain’s primary immune cells — can help to keep motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease from quickly advancing in early disease stages, work in a mouse disease model suggests. Its findings support studies indicating both a neuroprotective and damaging role for these immune cells over the disease’s…

People with sporadic Parkinson’s disease and those with Parkinson’s-associated mutations in the GBA gene show a distinct immune cell profile in the blood relative to healthy people, a study showed. In turn, Parkinson’s patients carrying disease-causing LRRK2 mutations had an immune cell profile comparable to people without any disease.

Researchers have discovered a new genetic link between platelets in the bloodstream and Parkinson’s disease, according to a large-scale genetic study that investigated associations between blood measures and neurological and psychiatric diseases. Variation in platelet size, called platelet distribution width (PDW), was found to be broader in Parkinson’s patients…

Subthalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) may bring benefits to people with Parkinson’s regardless of whether the disease is caused by a gene mutation or appears in patients with no associated mutations, a study in Spain found. Researchers investigated this surgical treatment’s use in people with LRRK2 and PRKN mutations — …

People with Parkinson’s disease are more likely to report a good quality of life if their caregivers are not strained, a new study suggests. “As caregiver strain was found to be related to patients’ QoL [quality of life], improvement in QoL for PD [Parkinson’s disease] patients may hinge on…