Stimulating brain circuits to treat Parkinson’s dementia (StimPD)

Context of the research and the challenge my fellowship addresses
Dementia is six times more common in Parkinson’s disease, affects over half of people living with Parkinson’s within 10 years, and has higher personal, societal and financial impact than other dementias. However, the mechanisms of Parkinson’s dementia remain unclear, and treatments extremely limited. Converging evidence suggests that Parkinson’s disease disrupts structural and functional brain circuits leading to cognitive impairment, so a promising approach for treating Parkinson’s dementia is to identify the brain circuits responsible and target them for intervention.
Aims and objectives
In my fellowship, I will use multimodal state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques in different populations of people with Parkinson's disease, to identify the brain circuits responsible for Parkinson’s dementia and apply novel non-invasive ultrasound stimulation on those circuits to improve cognition.
Summary of work to be carried out
In the first part of the project (Years 1-4), I will apply recent advances in neuroimaging to identify structural and functional brain circuits responsible for Parkinson’s dementia using independent sources of information. First, I will identify circuits whose electrical stimulation, using a surgical technique called deep brain stimulation (DBS), leads to improvement in cognition post-operatively. DBS surgery is an effective treatment for motor symptoms but is invasive and deemed unsuitable for people with cognitive impairment. Therefore, I will validate these findings in non-DBS Parkinson’s patients. Additionally, in my second experiment, I will use orthogonal, data-driven analyses in large number of patients with Parkinson's (not treated with DBS) who are followed up over time, to identify structural and functional brain circuits that are associated with cognitive decline over time. By combining multiple sources of information from different patient populations, I will be able to...