Parkinson’s disease is a long-lasting and slowly worsening brain condition that affects movement, thinking, sleep, and many other body functions.
More than one million people in the United States live with Parkinson’s, and over ten million people are affected worldwide.
The disease is best known for symptoms such as shaking hands, stiff muscles, slow movement, and balance problems.
However, Parkinson’s is much more than a movement disorder. Many people also experience sleep disturbances, digestive issues, mood changes, memory problems, and difficulty thinking clearly.
Current treatments for Parkinson’s disease focus mainly on reducing symptoms. Medications can help replace or mimic dopamine, a chemical in the brain that becomes low in Parkinson’s. These drugs can improve movement for a time, but their effects often wear off, and side effects can increase with long-term use.
In more advanced cases, some patients undergo deep brain stimulation, a surgical procedure in which electrodes are implanted into the brain to help control abnormal signals. While this treatment can be effective for certain symptoms, it is invasive, costly, and does not stop the disease from progressing.
Now, a major international research effort is offering new hope. Scientists from China’s Changping Laboratory, working together with researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and other institutions, have identified a specific brain network that appears to sit at the center of Parkinson’s disease.
Their findings suggest that targeting this network could lead to more effective and less invasive treatments.
The researchers focused on a brain system called the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN. This network is located in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement.
The SCAN plays a key role in turning planned actions into actual movements and then checking whether those movements happened as intended. Because Parkinson’s disease affects both movement and thinking, scientists suspected that this network might help explain the wide range of symptoms seen in patients.
The SCAN was first described by Dr. Nico U. Dosenbach and his colleagues in 2023. Building on that work, Dr. Hesheng Liu and his team wanted to know whether problems in this network could be driving Parkinson’s disease.
To investigate this, they examined brain scans from more than 800 people across several research centers in the United States and China. The participants included people with Parkinson’s disease receiving different treatments, healthy individuals, and people with other movement disorders.
By analyzing these brain images, the researchers discovered a clear pattern. In people with Parkinson’s disease, the SCAN was overly connected to deeper brain areas known as the subcortex.
The subcortex plays an important role in movement, emotion, memory, and automatic body functions. This excessive connection appeared to disrupt normal brain communication and interfere with both movement and thinking.
The team found something even more important. Across all types of treatment studied, including medications, deep brain stimulation, focused ultrasound, and non-invasive brain stimulation, patients improved most when this abnormal connection was reduced. In other words, treatments worked better when they helped restore balance between the SCAN and the subcortex.
Based on these findings, the researchers tested a new treatment approach using transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. This technique uses magnetic pulses delivered through a device placed on the scalp to gently change brain activity. Unlike deep brain stimulation, TMS does not require surgery and can be performed in a clinic.
In a small clinical trial, 18 patients received TMS targeted precisely at the SCAN. After just two weeks, 56 percent of these patients showed meaningful improvement in their Parkinson’s symptoms.
In comparison, only 22 percent of patients improved when nearby brain areas were stimulated instead. This means the SCAN-targeted treatment was more than twice as effective.
These results challenge the long-standing idea that Parkinson’s disease is mainly a problem of deep brain structures alone. Instead, the study suggests that Parkinson’s is a disorder of a broader brain network that links movement, thinking, and body control.
The findings, published in the journal Nature on February 4, point toward a future of more precise and personalized treatment. Because non-invasive brain stimulation does not require surgery, it could potentially be used earlier in the disease, before symptoms become severe.
Researchers believe that changing activity in the SCAN might not only improve symptoms but could one day slow or even reverse disease progression.
Looking ahead, Dr. Dosenbach plans to launch further clinical trials through a medical startup. These studies will test non-invasive treatments designed to improve walking and balance by targeting the SCAN. The team is also exploring other gentle techniques, such as low-intensity focused ultrasound, which uses sound waves to influence brain activity.
While more research is needed, this discovery marks an important step forward. For people living with Parkinson’s disease, it offers new hope that future treatments may be safer, more effective, and better tailored to how the disease actually works in the brain.
If you care about Parkinson’s disease, please read studies that Vitamin B may slow down cognitive decline, and Mediterranean diet could help lower risk of Parkinson’s.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies that blueberry supplements may prevent cognitive decline, and results showing Plant-based diets could protect cognitive health from air pollution.
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