When most people think of Parkinson’s disease, they picture physical symptoms like shaking, stiffness, or slow movements.
But for many people with Parkinson’s, other symptoms such as anxiety and memory problems can have just as much—if not more—impact on daily life.
The challenge is that these mental symptoms often go unnoticed until they become severe.
Neuropsychologist Marit Ruitenberg wants to change that.
Her research focuses on finding new ways to spot early signs of mental decline and anxiety in people with Parkinson’s disease, before the symptoms get worse.
She explains that some people with Parkinson’s have said that memory and thinking problems affect their lives more than physical symptoms do. But these issues are harder to see, even for doctors.
Ruitenberg and her team are looking for simple, non-invasive tests that could help detect these problems earlier, allowing people to get the help they need sooner.
One promising method involves a phenomenon called “practice effects.” This refers to how people tend to get better at cognitive (mental) tests simply because they’ve taken the test before and remember how it works.
Many researchers in the past have ignored these improvements, thinking they don’t mean much. But recent studies in Alzheimer’s disease suggest that these improvements might actually say a lot about brain health.
Ruitenberg wanted to see if the same idea could be used in Parkinson’s disease. In her study, people with Parkinson’s and healthy individuals took a set of thinking and memory tests twice over the course of a year. The healthy group improved more on the tests the second time than the Parkinson’s group did.
And those people with Parkinson’s who didn’t show much improvement ended up having greater memory decline later. This finding, published in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, suggests that lack of practice effects might be a warning sign for future cognitive problems.
While this is just the beginning, Ruitenberg believes this approach has potential. She and her team now want to figure out which tests work best, and whether shorter test intervals—like repeating the tests after just a week—can give even faster answers.
If practice effects can truly predict memory problems early on, doctors might be able to monitor patients more easily and even decide who should take part in clinical trials for new treatments.
In addition to memory and thinking problems, anxiety is another common but often ignored part of Parkinson’s. Between 30% and 50% of people with Parkinson’s experience anxiety, but it’s tricky to detect.
That’s because the physical symptoms of Parkinson’s—such as tremors or changes in blood pressure—can look like anxiety, making it harder to tell them apart.
To learn more about anxiety in Parkinson’s, a large international team is now working together. This includes experts from psychology, neurology, and movement science, with researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands and the University of Waterloo in Canada.
They’re using large amounts of data, computer modeling, and even virtual reality to understand how anxiety shows up in different ways.
The team is studying three main types of anxiety: general anxiety, anxiety in specific situations, and anxiety that causes people to avoid activities. The goal is to one day offer more personalized treatment depending on what kind of anxiety a person has.
Even though it might take years before this research changes everyday medical care, Ruitenberg remains hopeful. She believes that paying attention to these often-hidden symptoms can lead to better care and quality of life for people with Parkinson’s.
Scientific progress takes time, she says, but her goal is clear: she wants to make a real difference for people with Parkinson’s by helping doctors understand and treat all the symptoms—not just the visible ones.
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The study is published in Journal of Parkinson’s Disease.
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