Clinical Research Studies

Movement disorders represent a major public health crisis. Large longitudinal clinicopathological studies form the basis for studying the symptomatology, epidemiology, progression and pathogenesis of these diseases. In addition, by studying blood and brain tissue for biomarker and genetic studies has the potential to pave the way towards new diagnostics and uncover underlying pathogenic mechanisms that can be targeted for therapeutic development. The goal of this project is to perform a clinicopathological study of a large cohort of patients with movement and related disorders drawn from the patients at the Robert and John M. Bendheim (RJB) Parkinson and Movement Disorders Center and at The NYU Langone Health The Marlene and Paolo Fresco Institute for Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders (Fresco Institute). Movement disorders represent a large group of related diseases that include Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, essential tremor, myoclonus, chorea, and others. Here, volunteers will be assessed for clinical and neuroradiological features in an ongoing way during their disease course. Blood will be collected for genetic and biomarker studies. In addition, we will recruit healthy adult volunteers who will serve as controls to test the specificity of our findings. Finally, patients will be offered the opportunity to serve as brain tissue donors. These clinical and neuropathological variables will stored using the secure Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) web-based software and correlative studies will be performed.