Aug 31, 2026
Do different relationships among stimuli matter?
Written by Doc Irish | Aug. 26, 2026
One of the strangest things about living with Parkinson’s disease is how inconsistent it can be.
A movement that feels nearly impossible one moment can sometimes become easier a few seconds later. A person may struggle to initiate a step but then walk fluidly once they get going. A line on the floor, a rhythmic sound, a change in attention, or some other external cue can occasionally alter what the body seems capable of doing.
I keep coming back to the same question: If the machinery is completely broken, why can changing the context sometimes change the performance?
I don’t think that question has a simple answer. Parkinson’s is enormously complex, and dopamine, the basal ganglia, motor circuits, sensory processing, cognition, and many other systems are involved. I’m certainly not proposing that all of Parkinson’s can be reduced to one explanation.
But I increasingly wonder whether coordination deserves more attention as part of the picture.
We usually think about disease by asking which individual part is malfunctioning. Which molecule? Which neuron? Which brain region? Which pathway?
Those are essential questions. But there is another kind of failure that can occur even when individual parts retain some ability to function: the parts may stop working together properly.
Think about an orchestra. Every musician might still be capable of playing. But if their timing, sequencing, volume, or responsiveness to one another begins to drift, the music falls apart.
Nothing necessarily has to disappear. The relationships can fail.
Aug 28, 2026
Small trial finds Tai Chi and resistance-stretching offer different benefits
Written by Patricia Inácio, PhD | Aug. 14, 2026
- Tai Chi may improve motor symptoms, physical function, and quality of life in early to mid-stage Parkinson’s disease.
- Tai Chi appeared particularly beneficial for motor control, balance, and muscular endurance.
- Findings support tailoring exercise programs to patients’ specific rehabilitation needs.
Practicing Tai Chi four times a week may lessen motor symptoms and improve physical function and quality of life in people with early- to mid-stage Parkinson’s disease, a small clinical trial found.
A program combining resistance and stretching exercises produced similar overall improvements in motor symptoms, but each approach appeared to have different strengths. Tai Chi appeared to have relatively greater benefits for muscular endurance, motor control, and balance, while resistance-stretching exercise showed more consistent effects on strength, mobility, and functional performance.
“These findings highlight the value of tailoring exercise interventions to individual rehabilitation needs,” the researchers wrote.
Exercise may help fill treatment gaps in Parkinson’s
The study, “Effects of Tai Chi on core motor symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s disease: A three-armed randomized controlled trial,” was published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.
Parkinson’s is caused by the progressive loss of nerve cells that produce dopamine, a chemical messenger that helps control movement. Motor symptoms can include slowness of movement, muscle rigidity, tremor, balance problems, and difficulty walking.
While current treatments, such as levodopa, can ease several motor symptoms, they may be less effective for balance, posture, and other symptoms involving the body’s central axis. Exercise and rehabilitation can therefore be used alongside medication to help preserve mobility and independence.
Tai Chi is a mind-body exercise that combines slow, coordinated movements, controlled weight shifting, and attention to posture. Resistance exercises work muscles against a load to build strength, while stretching helps improve flexibility and range of motion.
Despite growing support for exercise-based rehabilitation in Parkinson’s, most studies have examined one type of exercise at a time, with few directly comparing Tai Chi and combined resistance-stretching exercise. Whether different forms of exercise affect specific motor symptoms differently also remains unclear.
With this in mind, researchers in China conducted a small, prospective, randomized pilot trial involving 45 adults ages 45 to 75 with early- to mid-stage disease. All could stand and walk independently, with or without an assistive device, and had been taking a stable medication regimen for at least a month.
Aug 27, 2026
A new study shows that a common virus can induce Parkinson’s-like brain damage and movement problems.
June 29, 2026 By Ann Kellett, Texas A&M University School of Public Health
Scientists usually use animal models when studying Parkinson’s disease because these models mimic the disease well. They are limited, however, because they require either gene modifications or the injection of toxicants, which may not accurately represent how the disease occurs in humans.
But now, researchers at Texas A&M University have developed a model that uses a nontoxic way to generate the symptoms of Parkinson’s: infection with a virus called Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus (TMEV), a natural pathogen in mice.
Their study is a game changer because it proves that a simple viral infection can trigger the exact brain damage and physical disabilities in animal models that are seen in people with Parkinson’s disease — and it sets the stage for additional studies.
“The toxic-exposure models are useful for studying Parkinson’s, but not all people who are exposed to chemicals go on to develop Parkinson’s, so these models cannot show all the ways a disease as complex as Parkinson’s actually begins or develops over time in people,” said Candice Brinkmeyer-Langford, a neurogenerative disease expert with the Texas A&M University School of Public Health at Texas A&M Health.
Parkinson’s affects more than 10 million people worldwide, making it second only to dementia among brain disorders. It destroys the cells that produce dopamine, a chemical essential for smooth body movement, leading to problems with balance and walking, tremors in the hands or fingers and overall stiffness, as well as mental or emotional distress.
Its origins are unknown, but for decades, experts have believed that the disease could be triggered by the brain inflammation caused by viruses — even those contracted decades earlier — as well as by a combination of a person’s genetics and environmental factors. This idea recently was affirmed by Brinkmeyer-Langford and others at Texas A&M in the case of another devastating motor neuron disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
“Viruses are known to cause entirely different diseases based on a person’s genetics,” she said. “For example, the Epstein-Barr virus causes mononucleosis, but may also contribute to cancer or multiple sclerosis, and SARS-CoV-2 can attack the heart and brain as well as the lungs.”
Aug 26, 2026
Company data link subtle eye changes to later declines in daily functioning
Written by Andrea Lobo | Aug. 17, 2026
- Eye-movement biomarkers may flag functional decline before standard assessments.
- Parkinson's can cause slower, less accurate eye movements as the disease progresses.
- Eye tracking may offer a sensitive way to monitor progression and treatment effects.
Neuralight’s eye-movement biomarkers may predict declines in daily functioning in people with Parkinson’s disease before those changes can be detected by conventional clinical assessments, new clinical study data suggest.
The PALOMA study (NCT05862649), which involved hundreds of adults at clinical sites in the U.S. and Europe, previously produced data that Neuralight said showed the biomarkers were more sensitive than the Movement Disorder Society-Sponsored Revision of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), a standardized clinical scale used to assess Parkinson’s symptoms and daily functioning.
The latest data extend those findings, with the company reporting that the eye-movement biomarkers can predict deterioration before it becomes apparent on conventional clinical assessments such as the MDS-UPDRS.
Eye tracking may better detect Parkinson’s progression
These biomarkers could help researchers assess treatment responses, monitor changes in disease over time, and evaluate strategies aimed at slowing disease progression.
“Neurology has needed a way to quantify how the brain changes over time, and to connect that change to what matters most: how a patient feels and functions day to day. These results provide evidence that this can now be done, and more sensitively than the gold-standard scale allows,” Edmund Ben-Ami, Neuralight’s co-founder and CEO, said in a company press release.
“This is another exciting milestone in our mission to make brain function measurable, for both the field and the patients it serves,” Ben-Ami added.
Parkinson’s is caused by the progressive dysfunction and loss of dopaminergic neurons — nerve cells that produce dopamine, a chemical messenger important for normal signaling and movement. People with Parkinson’s can have slower and less accurate eye movements, which may become more pronounced as the disease progresses.
Tracking eye movements may, therefore, help monitor disease progression. Neuralight’s computer-based eye-tracking technology uses a standard webcam to record facial videos, with machine-learning algorithms analyzing eye movements to generate biomarkers of brain function.
The PALOMA study aimed to assess whether Neuralight’s eye-movement biomarkers could be used to track disease progression and correlate with standard clinical assessments. Earlier data reported by Neuralight indicated that its eye-movement biomarkers were about 10 times more sensitive than the MDS-UPDRS at detecting disease progression.
Aug 25, 2026
By Olivia Dimmer – Aug 4, 2026 - Northwestern Medicine
A landmark international study has found that the genetic drivers of Parkinson’s disease can vary dramatically between populations, underscoring the need to include people of various ancestries in genetic research and clinical trials.
The study, published in The Lancet Neurology, analyzed genetic data from 99,783 participants in the Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program, including 58,559 people with Parkinson’s disease and 41,224 people without the disease. Investigators examined known Parkinson’s disease-causing mutations and high-risk variants across 11 ancestry groups, making it the largest and most genetically diverse Parkinson’s study conducted to date.
The findings have immediate implications for the newest generation of therapies targeting specific Parkinson’s-related genes as they move through clinical trials, said Niccolo Mencacci, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology’s Division of Movement Disorders, who was a co-author of the study.
“Scientists have learned a lot about the genetics of Parkinson’s disease over the past couple of decades, but there’s a big blind spot: almost all of that research has been done in people of European ancestry,” Mencacci said. “About three out of every four genetic studies of Parkinson’s disease have focused on this one group, even though Parkinson’s affects people all over the world.”
In the study, investigators found that 2.1 percent of people with Parkinson’s carried a genetic variant known to directly cause the disease, while nearly 12 percent carried variants that increase disease risk. However, the frequency of variants differed substantially among ancestry groups. For example, disease-causing variants were identified in 10.7 percent of participants of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, but as few as 0.4 percent of participants of African ancestry. Based on the study data, risk-associated variants in the genes GBA1 and LRRK2 were detected in nearly 6,900 people with Parkinson’s disease.
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