Who am I and what do I work on?
I am a professor of movement disorders neurology, and I the director of the Radboudumc Centre of Expertise for Parkinson Disease & Movement Disorders. This centre is internationally recognised as a centre of excellence for Parkinson’s disease, and as a centre of expertise for rare movement disorders.
The overarching goal of the team working in our centre is to improve the quality of life of everyone affected by neurological movement disorders worldwide. We achieve this through four complementary approaches: optimal patient care, with a focus on integrated and multidisciplinary care delivered in networks; healthcare innovation, aiming to develop improved models of care; translational research, spanning the spectrum from more fundamental approaches to applied work that directly affects the quality of life of patients; and education of the next generation of clinicians and scientists.
What initiative do I represent?
The Radboudumc Centre of Expertise for Parkinson Disease & Movement Disorders is host to a broad range of initiatives. Examples include our nationwide ParkinsonNet network which serves as a healthcare infrastructure to deliver optimal care for people with Parkinson’s across the country; the Personalised Parkinson Project, which is a large-scale longitudinal cohort study with extreme deep phenotyping of early-stage patients with Parkinson’s disease; the PRIME project, which aims to develop and evaluate an innovative integrated model of care for people with Parkinson’s disease.
We are also host to large new studies that both aim to prevent the growth of Parkinson’s disease, namely the SLOW Speed trial (the first Parkinson prevention study in the world, using remotely delivered exercise as the intervention) and the Parkinson-PEST study (a large-scale study that aims to further clarify the relationship between Parkinson’s disease the one hand, and pesticides and other environmental toxicants on the other hand). We also have a large program dedicated to the development of digital biomarkers derived from wearable sensor data, for both diagnostic and prognostic purposes.
What is our connection with the Healthy Brain pillar?
All efforts within the the Radboudumc Centre of Expertise for Parkinson Disease & Movement Disorders fit perfectly within the overarching Healthy Brain concept, because we focus on two major strategies: improving the quality of life of those affected by neurodegenerative brain disorders today; and preventive strategies aiming to stop the rapid worldwide growth of these debilitating neurological disorders.