BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) offers a unique window on the connectivity changes, extending beyond the basal ganglia, which accompany the cognitive symptoms of Parkinson disease (PD). The primary purpose of this study was to assess the microstructural damage to cerebral white matter occurring in idiopathic PD. MATERIALS AND METHODS Our sample included patients with PD ...

Psychogenic movement disorders (PMD) represent a diagnostically challenging group of patients in movement disorders. Finger tapping tests (FTT) have been used in neuropsychiatric evaluations to identify psychogenic conditions, but their use in movement disorders has been limited to the quantification of upper extremity disability in idiopathic Parkinson disease (IPD). We evaluated the ability o...

Transcranial sonography is a highly sensitive noninvasive sonographic method for detection of early and specific echogenic changes in basal ganglia of patients with some neurodegenerative diseases. Transcranial sonography showed substantia nigra hyperechogenicity as a typical echo feature in idiopathic Parkinson disease and lenticular nucleus hyperechogenicity as a characteristic finding in aty...

Mutations in alpha-synuclein gene cause familial form of Parkinson disease, and deposition of wild-type alpha-synuclein as Lewy bodies occurs as a hallmark lesion of sporadic Parkinson disease and dementia with Lewy bodies, implicating alpha-synuclein in the pathogenesis of Parkinson disease and related neurodegenerative diseases. Dopamine neurons in substantia nigra are the major site of neuro...

Artificial neural network(ANN) with tansig, logsig and purelin transfer function, support vector machines(SVM), linear and quadratic classifiers are used in this work for the detection of Parkinson disease using voice features. In the Parkinson disease, voice of a person changes because of presence of tremor in the voicebox muscles. Total 195 phonations were used for the analysis from twenty th...

Parkinson disease is a neurological disorder. In this disease control over body muscles get disturbed. In almost 90% of the cases, people suffering from Parkinson disease (PD) have speech disorders. The goal of the paper is to differentiate healthy and PD affected persons using voice analysis. There are no well-developed lab techniques available for Parkinson detection. Parkinson detection usin...

In this Commentary, I describe the events that led from an NINDS-sponsored Workshop on Parkinson Disease Research in 1995, where I was asked to speak about the genetics of Parkinson disease, to the identification a mere two years later of a mutation in alpha-synuclein as the cause of autosomal dominant Parkinson disease in the Contursi kindred. I review the steps we took to first map and then f...