AAN 2026 | Key movement disorder advances from the 2026 AAN Annual Meeting

Yeah, this year’s AAN meeting was very exciting. This huge meeting covers a whole lot of areas of neurology, and you could easily get lost in all the new things that are available. And it’s very exciting to know that the field of neurology is not so much about diagnostics anymore, and we have a lot happening that could improve the quality of life of our patients. So it was very exciting to go to all these different sessions and learn about all areas of neurology, but also about movement disorders. In the movement disorder world, we care for patients with Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, patients with Tourette’s, patients with tardive dyskinesia, all sorts of different abnormal hyper or hypokinetic movement disorders. In Parkinson’s disease, there are many new clinical trials that are very exciting. We covered some of the surgical new advances that I mentioned earlier. There are cell therapies. There are several cell therapy clinical trials that have started and are starting in several institutions. Their surgical approaches have improved. The doses have improved. The approaches have improved. So we are all very excited about these cell therapies to see how that will be helpful for our patients. Our patients are very excited to participate in these trials.

There are a number of other studies that have been very successful. Genetic studies, Parkinson’s PD GENEration study, Parkinson’s study that focused on genetic determination has been very successful. And now we are starting to learn more and more about different genetic subtypes of Parkinson. And we’re excited to see what specific approaches we can have for these specific genetic mutations and therefore have kind of better outcomes for our future clinical trials.

We have a number of biomarker studies that have been in the works and some of the results were shared. Those are also very exciting to follow up on. We do have some studies that are working on treatment of an anti-inflammatory approach to treatment of Parkinson’s disease because inflammation is a big part of Parkinson’s disease and onset and progression. So anti-inflammatory trials, specifically one PRISM study that is starting in several centers, focuses on treatment with an anti-inflammatory medication that could potentially, the question of the study is whether it would slow progression from the prodromal phase where patients only have REM behavior disorder to motor phase where they have the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

There are a number of studies that are coming up for essential tremor. Essential tremor also is a very common movement disorder. And like I mentioned, there are some advances in surgical approaches to treatment of essential tremor, including focused ultrasound, MR-guided focused ultrasound treatment that has been around for a few years now. And now we’re doing staged bilateral MR-guided focused ultrasound treatment for these patients who have essential tremor that are not DBS candidates or do not want to proceed with DBS. DBS has been around for surgical treatments, and like I mentioned, the surgical approaches, image-guided programming has helped a lot with that. There has been a newly approved medication for essential tremor, a more selective calcium channel blocker medication that is very exciting for patients who are not quite ready for surgical approaches, but haven’t responded to the first-line treatment and may consider this medication. So we’re excited about that treatment. There are trials that are happening for botulinum toxin treatment of essential tremor, and that’s another option for these patients.

So many new available approaches for patients who have all these different movement disorders. And I didn’t even go into all these other movement disorders that we have, like for Tourette’s. We have trials that are looking at new surgical targets and also closed-loop treatment for those. There are many different exciting approaches that are becoming available for our patients. So it’s a good time to be a neurologist.

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