AAN 2026 | Developing biomarkers based on early autonomic dysfunction in movement disorders

One of the more exciting areas in this field, you know, as it relates to movement disorders and autonomic complications is the fact that autonomic dysfunction occurs very early in these disease states. So it can often be a very early marker or a prodromal marker of disease even before or long before patients develop the motor symptoms of, say, Parkinson’s or even MSA. And so, you know, developing, first of all, awareness that these are early symptoms, they’re treatable, but also developing sort of biomarkers if you have an autonomic dysfunction group that you can use to sort of characterize, hopefully, which path they’re going to go down and develop, whether that’s Parkinson’s, Lewy Body Disease, or MSA, just based on the characterization or the distribution of which autonomic symptoms are affected. Yeah, I think just to, you know, advocate for autonomic disorders at the AAN, in the past several years, we’ve had a lot of challenges getting autonomic content here at this meeting. I think, luckily, in the recent years, the AAN, you know, meeting committee has allowed us to do section presentations, and we had two collaborative sections at this meeting, one with movement disorders and one with the sports neurology section. Incredibly well attended. So I think a lot of neurologists and a lot of physicians want to learn more about autonomic dysfunction. It’s incredibly common across all disease states and important for overall health. But I think we just need more educational content at meetings like this and other meetings to kind of better educate folks about it.

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