Nutritional Neuroprotection Research Center

What if dopamine is distraction? What if we’re looking in the wrong place? What if parkinsonism is a metabolic disease resulting from bad genes and/or environmental insults?

Success is defined by patient-reported symptoms and quality of life.

We only do pragmatic research; when we’re done, patients and providers will immediately be able to put these results to use.

The collective intelligence of the community (big data) is used to describe the choices, actions, and lifestlye of indiviudals with fast/ slowly progressing diseases. 

This simple study is designed to describe the people with PD who are in the best shape 20 years after diagnosis. Over 1,500 individuals have already enrolled in this study (target 5000). Every 6 months they tell us how/ what they're doing and we write code that allows us to identifiy the behaviors associated with faster/ slower progression.

"The Role of Diet and Nutritional Supplements in Parkinson's Disease Progression" 

http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2017/6405278.pdf

We need funding to analyze/ publish data on exercise, pharmaceuticals, and social health factors associated with RATE of Parkinson's disease progression. 

Over 1000 indiviuduals with MS are enrolled in this large-scale study seeking to describe people with the best outcomes. Who are those indiviudals that are diagnosed with MS and have few symptoms and an excellent quality of life 20 years later? Who are the positive deviants and what are they doing differently?

We asked 10 indiviudals with PD to wear an accelerometer for 2 weeks and push a button on the sensor each time s/he used cannabis during the observation period. We presented a poster at the 2017 Movement Disorder Conference suggesting cannabis reduced PD tremor and improved sleep. 

The study is complete, data analysis is done, and the results are exciting! We are in search of a graduate student to help write up the manuscript. 

We've just analyzed the data from the www.CAMCareMS.bastyr.edu study to see whether indiviuduals who have been following the Swank diet over time are doing better than those eating an ordinary diet. Status: Manuscript submitted, awaiting review.