Journal of Parkinson's Disease

19/06/2026

🎉 Exciting news from the Journal of Parkinson's Disease!

The journal has achieved its highest-ever Impact Factor of 𝟱.𝟵, up from 𝟱.𝟬 last year 📈

A huge thank you to our community, Co-Editors-in-Chief Bastiaan Bloem and Lorraine Kalia for their leadership, and to our publisher Sage Publications.

17/06/2026

For me the most enjoyable read of the last week (for its literary qualities) was this pointed critique in Neurology of rating scales by Alexis Demas: https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000218172
Of course we need validated rating scales in clinical trials as objective standardized measures to drive progress. In clinical medicine, however, we all encounter patients that are not satisfied despite rating scales demonstrating a good outcome. One of the most difficult endeavours in the art of medicine is nuanced expectation setting.
Therefore, it is nice to read the progress on quality of life scales in 2 recent papers in JPD.
The first paper is about the Parkinson's Disease-Health Index (PD-HI), developed together with people with Parkinson's disease. This novel patient-reported outcome provides a comprehensive assessment of disease burden in many patient-identified important motor and non-motor domains.
The second paper evaluates caregiver's quality of life using the generic FROM-16 ( Family Reported Outcome Measure-1 ) that is complementary to the Parkinson's disease specific PDQ-Carer. Parkinson's disease in a loved one has a huge impact on caregivers' quality of life, similar to many other chronic diseases. An impact that can improve with a change in therapy is the impact on holidays. I always consider it a good sign when advanced PD patients and their families start travelling again after changing to a device-aided therapy.
To improve quality of life, for many problems a multidisciplinary approach is warranted involving physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dietitians and/or speech and language therapy with also important roles for PD nurses and nurse specialists. Within ParkinsonNet a novel patient-accessible guideline has been developed that I would like to draw you attention to. You can read it here: https://web.alii.care/home (so far only in Dutch, but translations will follow) or learn more about it in Bas Bloem’s Parkinson Weekly podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/parkinson-weekly/id1836115672?i=1000772126442

You can read the full text JPD articles here:
- PD-HI article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1877718X261422098
- caregiver's quality of life article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1877718X261428288

Highlight written by Bruno Bergmans

Bastiaan Bloem

11/06/2026

📰 New in JPD: A 10-year analysis (2015-2024) of the Parkinson's disease clinical trial pipeline captured 444 trials of drug therapies intended to treat (63% of trials) or slow disease progression (37% of trials). Of this, 14 drugs have been approved to treat symptoms, but there are still no treatments to modify the course of the disease.

Read more: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1877718X261454154

Background There is an urgent need to find more effective treatments for motor and non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) and to ultimately discove...

11/06/2026

📢 Neurology researchers - want to strengthen your publishing skills?

Join our webinar Mastering the Neurology Publication Journey (17 June, 4PM BST) to learn manuscript writing, peer review, and editor expectations.

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Join us for an engaging webinar tailored specifically for neurologists and neurology researchers, where you’ll learn essential skills for writing and structuring compelling academic manuscripts and gain insights into the peer review process. This session will break down the manuscript writing proc...

05/06/2026

The other day over lunch I had an enriching discussion with my colleagues Patrick Santens and Arnout Bruggeman at Ghent University Hospital on the focus on α-synuclein (αSyn) aggregation as a target for disease modification. It is clear there are still many gaps in our understanding of the pathophysiology of Parkinson's disease (PD).
Therefore, I found it enlightening to read the new review article about the role of synaptic (vesicle) dysfunction in Parkinson's disease. It is part of a special 7th World Parkinson Congress issue ( ).

Several organelles are implicated in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease:
- mitochondria: can be impaired through mutations in PARK2/PRKN (parkin), PARK6 (PINK1), PARK7 (DJ-1), PARK15 (FBX07), PARK17 (VPS35), and PARK23 (VPS13C)
- lysosomes: disruption of autophagy is linked to PARK2/PRKN (parkin), PARK6 (PINK1), PARK8 (LRRK2), PARK9 (ATP13A2), PARK17 (VPS35), GBA1 (glucocerebrosidase 1), and TMEM175 (transmembrane protein 175)
- synaptic vesicles: a fascinating tightly regulated machinery critical to synaptic transmission and to prevent oxidative damage from cytoplasmic neurotransmitter accumulation.
It is fascinating to see how many proteins linked to Parkinson's disease play essential roles in the presynaptic vesicle cycle. Especially PARK1/PARK4/SNCA (α-synuclein) and PARK8 (LRRK2) emerge as key players with crucial roles in many involved pathways, but also PARK2/PRKN (parkin), PARK6 (PINK1), PARK7 (DJ-1) and GBA1 (GBA) are implicated.

Key insights from this article highlighted by the authors are:
- the often overlooked involvement of other neurotransmitters, especially glutamatergic signaling
- αSyn pathology produces region-specific changes that in lockstep with circuit-specific vulnerability may explain the selective substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) neurodegeneration in PD
- presynaptic αSyn pathology drives postsynaptic plasticity impairments and circuit imbalances which progressively spread through interconnected pathways, providing an explanation for the varied symptoms in PD
- the recent paradigm shift that synaptic vesicle dysfunction is not just an early event in the disease but a central, targetable mechanism that drives neurodegeneration

A lot more work is needed to harness the therapeutic window for early intervention that the early appearance of synaptic deficits creates. Other fields learn us that it is possible to restore presynaptic function to a certain degree, like this spectacular video from Maria Stamelou's group demonstrates: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10072-025-08675-w . This SCA27B patient showed a dramatic symptomatic improvement on the potassium channel blocker 4-aminopyridine that restores neurotransmitter release and cerebellar Purkinje cell firing. Those were hampered by FGF14 mutations that negatively influence voltage-gated sodium channels and the synaptic vesicle cycle.

If you want to know more about the wondrous world of the tightly regulated synaptic vesicle cycle, you can read the full text here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1877718X261431203
by Julita Chlebowicz, Violetta Ivanova & Jacqueline Burré

Highlight written by Bruno Bergmans

Bastiaan Bloem

04/06/2026

💡 New blog post in JPD: From One Size Fits All to Gaining Consensus that Personalized Medicine is the Future, by Susanne J. Bowen

Read here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-one-size-fits-all-gaining-consensus-personalized-journal-gmdle/

By Susanne J. Bowen, Westfield, IN April was Parkinson’s Awareness Month.

04/06/2026

📕 NEW ISSUE. Featuring Review articles on:

The central cholinergic system as a therapeutic target in Parkinson's disease, by Miller et al.

High intensity interval training for Parkinson's disease, by Sivaramakrishnan et al.

Explore the issue: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/pkna/16/3

Table of contents for Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, 16, 3

26/05/2026

With the World Parkinson Congress in full swing I would like to highlight the treasure trove of abstracts you can access at Journal of Parkinson's Disease.
One of the most pressing unmet needs in the field is the current lack of disease-modifying and preventive therapies. The recent news of a failed LRRK2 inhibitor trial (https://investors.biogen.com/news-releases/news-release-details/biogen-and-denali-therapeutics-provide-update-phase-2b-luma ) demonstrates once more these approaches unfortunately remain out of reach, for now. To address these issues at the eve of the main congress a very interesting trial design forum took place: Planning for Prevention of Parkinson's and Related Synucleinopathies.
From this forum these two abstracts in particular caught my eye:
- an abstract by Sophie I Meyer et al. from the wonderful GP2 initiative ( http://gp2.org/ ) documenting the herculean effort to form the largest clinical and genetic dataset of prodromal PD (>5000 samples, including non-manifesting LRRK2 and GBA1 carriers). Hopefully the careful study of this cohort can lead to breakthroughs on disease modification strategies. You can still contribute to this initiative.
- a review by Anaya Sanjiv Navangul et al. about risk disclosure in people with prodromal features of neurodegenerative diseases. The authors present a very nuanced view on this thorny issue: " Risk disclosure should be tailored to the individual, considering preferences, mental wellbeing, and symptomology. Further research is needed to differentiate between clinical prodromal features and neurodegenerative conditions, given differences in progression rate and certainty. Efforts to recruit individuals with prodromal markers from real-world, non-research contexts could enhance generalizability to the wider public."

You can read all abstracts here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1877718X261441451

Don’t forget to take a look at the abstracts of the main congress either: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/1877718X261451755

Highlight written by Bruno Bergmans

Bastiaan Bloem

26/05/2026

JPD Associate Editor for Clinical Trials, Dr. Kevin McFarthing, won the Distinguished Collaborative Research Award. The award is presented by the World Parkinson Coalition to honor individuals whose extraordinary work has made a lasting global impact on Parkinson's research.

This award is well-deserved and a wonderful acknowledgment of the excellent work that Kevin does. Congratulations!