EAN 2026 | Parkinson’s disease beyond motor symptoms: understanding its multisystem nature
Tiago Outeiro, PhD, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, discusses the clinical features of Parkinson’s disease (PD) beyond its well-recognized motor manifestations. Prof. Outeiro explains how pathological changes in multiple brain systems can give rise to a range of non-motor symptoms, emphasizing the need to view PD as a multisystem neurodegenerative disorder rather than solely a movement disorder. This interview took place at the 12th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Transcript
So traditionally we’ve thought of Parkinson’s disease as a movement disorder, which it is, because these are the symptoms that bring patients to the clinicians, to the movement disorder specialists, and that’s how they get diagnosed with the disease. However, now we recognize that years before the onset of the motor symptoms, there are already other types of alterations that suggest the involvement of other brain areas...
So traditionally we’ve thought of Parkinson’s disease as a movement disorder, which it is, because these are the symptoms that bring patients to the clinicians, to the movement disorder specialists, and that’s how they get diagnosed with the disease. However, now we recognize that years before the onset of the motor symptoms, there are already other types of alterations that suggest the involvement of other brain areas. We know people present REM sleep behavior alterations. They present with hyposmia, with constipation, with depression. So what this is telling us is that we need to think of Parkinson’s not just as a movement disorder but as a disease that affects multiple brain areas, and eventually we will need to treat those dimensions as well, not just the movement disorder component. And so this is what I think is important to convey: that Parkinson’s is a complex disease that will need to be treated holistically in its multiple dimensions.
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