Dr. David Vaillancourt from the UF Department of Health and Human Performance and the UF Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration was awarded a large grant from NIH study study imaging biomarkers of Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders.
A summary of the research is below:
Parkinson’s disease, multiple system atrophy, progressive supranuclear palsy, and essential tremor affect over 10 million people in the United States. These debilitating movement disorders can be very difficult to distinguish from each other, have different prognoses, and can respond very differently to available therapies. The purpose of this grant is to identify structural and functional changes in the brain using non-invasive neuroimaging techniques to develop sensitive and specific markers for each of these diseases, and then to track how these markers change as each disease progresses.