MONTH IN REVIEW | January 2024

We’re looking forward to lots of exciting things in 2024!

Happy New Year! We’re excited to share another year with you through our monthly e-newsletters! We hope that you had a lovely holiday season and a happy start ot 2024.

Congratulations!

We would like to say congratulations to Dr. Alexander Baumgartner who was offered and accepter the NeuroNEXT Fellowship Research Grant. He received a competitive one-year grant from the University of Colorado Rocky Mountain NeuroNEXT for his pilot study. You can read more about Dr. Baumgartner’s research interests here.

Dr. Isabelle Buard, Dr. Matthew Woodward, Dr. Jeanne Feuerstein, and Ying Liu presented posters at the 2023 Parkinson’s Study Group in December 2023.

Welcome, Dr. Aslam!

The Movement Disorders Faculty and staff are excited to welcome Sana Aslam, DO.

She is a board-certified neurologist who specializes in Movement Disorders at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She completed her undergraduate education at Wellesley College and Medical School at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. Following medical school, she completed her Neurology training and a Movement Disorders and Deep Brain Stimulation Fellowship at the Barrow Neurological Institute.

Read more about Dr. Aslam on our Meet the Team! page.

Upcoming Events

Parkinson’s Foundation Revolution Ride

Saturday, February 24, 2024, 12:30 PM
Parkinson’s Foundation
CycleBar Southwest Plaza
Come see us that the Parkinson’s Foundation fundraiser. We’ll be cheering on riders and giving out some goodies!
Learn more here.

From Dependent to Independent: Treatment Options for Essential Tremor

This series of talks will resume again in March. Please stay tuned for details.

In the News

Here are a few noteworthy articles that were published recently. Some of our faculty have contributed to the articles below. We encourage you to check them out!

Research

The MDC Faculty regularly publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. Some of these may not be available to read without a subscription. But, these listings will let you know what the faculty have been working on lately!

  • Cristini J, Potvin-Desrochers A, Seo F, Dagher A, Postuma RB, Rosa-Neto P, Carrier J, Amara AW, Steib S, Paquette C, Roig M. The Effect of Different Types of Exercise on Sleep Quality and Architecture in Parkinson Disease: A Single-Blinded Randomized Clinical Trial Protocol. Phys Ther. 2024 Jan 1;104(1):pzad073. doi: 10.1093/ptj/pzad073. PMID: 37354450; PMCID: PMC10776310.

Have you considered participating in clinical research?

Did you know…

  • all of the current therapies we have came from clinical trials?
  • people in clinical trials tend to have better clinical outcomes? (This could be because they are more closely observed by a expert clinician, the placebo effect, or because it inspires hope.)
  • the Movement Disorders Center has interventional and observational trials? This means we have studies that offer therapies for movement disorders and we have studies where clinicians monitor the progress of diseases with no therapy offered.

If you are interested in learning more, reach out to our research recruitment team at NeuroResearch@cuanschutz.edu or 303-724-4644.

2023 World Parkinson Disease Day

April 11 is World Parkinson Disease Day. The faculty and staff at the University of Colorado are proud to work with the Parkinson Community. While patient care is a large part of our care for the Parkinson’s community, there is a lot more they do outside of the clinic.

The Anschutz Medical Campus is a training facility for upcoming medical providers. Our faculty participates in the education of young medical students and residents. Additionally, we have a movement disorders fellowship program to train the next generation of movement disorders neurologists. In addition to becoming part of our own faculty, these trainees have gone on to serve movement disorders communities in underserved areas and continue clinical research in their own practices. You can learn more about our program and its importance by visitng our Fund-a-Fellow page.

Our faculty are also leading research to find new therapies or better understand Parkinson disease. This research can include trials of potential new medications or devices. It also includes research projects initiated by our own faculty that help patients and care partners. If you are interested in learning more about our research, we have a research catalog and a research website for you to view. If you are interested in participating in clinical research, contact our research recruitment team. Many resources are available in English and Spanish.
e-mail: NeuroResearch@cuanschutz.edu
phone: 303-724-4644
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In 2022, our faculty provided 64 formal talks to patients, care partners, medical providers, and medical learners. These talks were regional, national, and international. Our faculty finds so much value in providing access to updated information to the Parkinson’s community to help them take control of their health. If you are interested in having someone speak to your group, please reach out to movement@ucdenver.edu.

In addition, we will host our 10th Annual Parkinson Disease Symposium on October 28, 2023. Follow our Facebook page for updated details. You can look for an event page on our website soon. We look forward to an informational and exciting day with many special extras this year.

The University of Colorado Movement Disorders Center looks forward to continuing these missions in 2023 and beyond. We look forward to connecting with you.

MDC Receives Parkinson’s Foundation Award

The University of Colorado Movement Disorders Center received an award from the Parkinson’s Foundation for the Highest Team Participation for the Parkinson’s Foundation Palliative Care Education Course. The award was presented at this year’s COE Leadership Conference and was accepted by Ryan Khan, a chaplain who works closely with our Palliative Care team.

In 2020, the Parkinson’s Foundation launched an initiative to make palliative care a standard practice of care across all Centers of Excellence in the United States. The MDC received the award for being the Center of Excellence (COE) with the most team members who have completed the online Palliative Care Training.

The Movement Disorders Center is honored to receive this award in recognition to our dedication to patient care.

New Interdisciplinary Clinic Opening in Boulder + More Good News

We have a lot to celebrate this month!

Our interdisciplinary Boulder team completed the Parkinson’s Foundation Team Training. This course was designed by the Parkinson’s Foundation to increase knowledge of Parkinson’s disease. The course is also designed to encourage collaborative care. This was an intensive course that ran throughout the Spring. We look forward to enrolling more of our interdisciplinary team in the future.

Our Boulder team will begin hosting an Annual Parkinson’s Disease Interdisciplinary Clinic. This clinic is designed specifically for individuals with Parkinson’s disease. During this annual visit, patients receive a standardized set of evaluations by their movement disorders specialist, Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Speech Therapy. The goal is for people with Parkinson’s disease to go through this clinic yearly. This will assist in tracking the progression of Parkinson’s disease more accurately and integrate the perspectives of the interdisciplinary team when offering our recommendations for activity-based and pharmacological treatments. Our hope is that this input will help patients maintain their optimal function and quality of life. This clinic is also offered at our Anschutz Medical Campus.

Congratulations to Michelle Fullard, MD and Isabelle Buard, PhD for receiving the University of Colorado Department of Neurology’s Intradepartmental Grant. This award has been offered since early 2016 to assistant and associate professors. This grant is designed to give the junior faculty a jumpstart on new research years and allows for protected time to prepare a grant application, write a peer-reviewed journal article, develop collaborations and/or perform any other research task that may otherwise be challenging because of time.

Dr. Buard’s research is “Investigating cortical sleep patterns disruption after traumatic brain injury under the mentorship of Dr. Benzi Kluger and Dr. Jeff Hebert. Dr. Fullard will conduct Examining gender differences in therapy preferences and risk tolerance in Parkinson disease” under the mentorship of Dr. Maureen Leehey. Dr. Fullard recently completed an interview with Davis Phinney Foundation about “Removing Barriers to Deep Brain Stimulation for Women with Parkinson’s.” You can watch the full interview on YouTube on Davis Phinney Foundation’s channel.

Dr. Forbes Accepted to Clinical Faculty Scholars Program

Congratulations to Dr. Emily Forbes on her acceptance into the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute’s (CCTSI) Clinical Faculty Scholars Program (CFSP). This program enrolls up to five junior faculty members each year. The program helps young researchers obtain grant funding for their career growth or their first independent investigator-initiated project. Often these are K-awards or R-awards which are funded by the NIH. These can also be awards from large non-profit organizations. The CCTSI trains these budding researchers through guided project development, educational seminars, grant writing classes, and mentorship participation.

Dr. Forbes’s project will build a Neurogenetics database. The first goal will be to characterize genetic causes of Parkinson’s disease in the University of Colorado’s patient population. She will follow this group over time to see how they respond to treatment based on their genetic variant. She will build this database to include phenotypic (observable characteristics) and genotypic (genetic characteristics) information across different specialties in Neurology. This will lead to a department resource for genetics research. Her long-term aim is to develop a tool to advance fair and the best genetic testing for patients. This will also help to provide thorough genetic counseling. This tool will make clinical trials for disease-modifying treatments available to more patients and quicken the rate of developing new therapies. Additionally, it will widen the availability of clinical trials to patient populations.

Other Movement faculty alumni of the CFSP program include Dr. Michelle Fullard and Dr. Samantha Holden and former movement disorders faculty, Dr. Brian Berman, and Dr. Benzi Kluger.

Being part of a medical school means that in addition to seeing patients, our faculty are also involved in additional pursuits. One of these pursuits is conducting clinical research related to their field. Most research falls into two categories: clinical trials and investigator-initiated research. Clinical trials are a type of clinical research that aims to determine the safety and effectiveness of the medication, devices, and treatment regimens. Investigator-initiated research starts with new ideas that the researcher comes up with themself. The researcher then is responsible for creating a trial to test their idea and then carrying out the trial. All research must adhere to strict rules and regulations. You can read more about the research here.

Research Update | The Relationship Between Olfactory Dysfunction and Constipation in Early Parkinson’s Disease

Written by Alex Baumgartner, MD

In a recent issue of the journal Movement Disorders, colleagues and I published a study examining the relationship between two of the most common ‘non-motor’ symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD): decreased sense of smell (olfactory dysfunction) and constipation. It has been known for some time that these symptoms often start several years or even decades before the typical ‘motor’ symptoms of PD, which include tremor, stiffness, and slow movement. Going along with this, accumulation of the abnormal protein alpha-synuclein, which is thought to play a critical role in the development of PD, have been found in the nasal passages and GI tracts of PD patients before it is found in the brain. This has led many to hypothesize that PD may actually begin in the nose or in the gut and spread from there to the brain.

We wanted to explore whether we could find evidence that for some people, PD begins in the nasal passages while in other people, it begins in the gut. We hypothesized that if people had PD originating in the nasal passages only, they would have only loss of smell and not constipation. On the other hand, if PD originated in the GI tract only, they would have constipation but not loss of smell. We looked at data from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), which collects information from patients who have recently been diagnosed with PD.

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We found that at the time people are diagnosed with PD, they tend to have problems with smelling and constipation to similar degrees. That is, people with worse sense of smell also tend to have worse constipation, and those with minimal loss of smell tend to have mild constipation. This finding actually went against our hypothesis. There may be a few reasons for this. The first is that the time of diagnosis of PD (based on tremor, slowness, and stiffness) may be too late to detect a difference in smell and constipation. Even if PD begins in either the nose or the gut, symptoms in the other location may have already ‘caught up’ with the first. The second possible explanation is that PD may begin in both locations at about the same time. This is called the dual-hit hypothesis, and has gained popularity in recent years. In the future, we hope to expand our research to help elucidate where and when the earliest signs of Parkinson’s occur.