An #NHS mental health risk assessment as #art .

Clinical forms being turned into creative forms at the @royalacademyarts.bsky.social Summer Exhibition.

🙏 Thanks to our participants, @parkinsons.org.uk for their support, reviewers & @wellcometrust.bsky.social for funding.

PD patients with depression deserve effective treatments.

A deeper understanding of the mechanisms can guide new treatments & bring new hope.

⚡ Implications: Reduced reward sensitivity may be a key driver of PD depression.

🚨 Crucially, dopamine-based treatments alone are not enough.

✅ New, non-dopaminergic therapies are needed to improve motivation & mood in PD depression.

💊 What about #dopamine?

We tested both PD groups ON & OFF medication.

✔️ In non-depressed PD, dopamine improves reward 🍎 sensitivity
❌ In PD depression, dopamine had NO effect.
🚨 PD depression is driven by reduced reward sensitivity that is dopamine-unresponsive .

🔍 Using computational 💻 modeling, we examined how reward & effort shaped decisions.

Key result: PD depression = lower reward sensitivity → leading to fewer accepted offers.

In short: PD patients with depression were less incentivised by reward 🍎.

🧪 Study: We recruited 125 participants across 4 groups:
✔️ PD + depression
✔️ PD - depression
✔️ Depression (no PD)
✔️ Healthy controls

Participants performed an effort-based decision-making task assessing how reward 🍎 & effort 💪 (grip force) influenced choices.

Fascinating talk at #BRAIN conference by Prof. Monckton—In #Huntington’s disease, CAG repeat mutation length is tissue-specific.

A patient with 50 CAG repeats on testing may have some striatal cells with >500 repeats right next to other normal neurons.

A misty still winter morning on the #Yorkshire coast.

'when they treated the patient with antifungals, antivirals or antibiotics, the dementia went away' 🤔🤨

'our guess is that probably half or more could potentially be treated.' 🤔🤨

Brilliant exhibition of Leonardo, Michelangelo & Raphael @royalacademy.bsky.social

Michelangelo apparently destroyed most of his drawings in an attempt to create the impression his masterpieces were pure genius first attempts.

He definitely wouldn’t have been a fan of preprints…

Brilliant review of the amyloid cascade hypothesis in #Alzheimers.

Real progress = moving away from ‘amyloid dogma’ to ‘capture the full complexity of the disease’.

How does this fit with the worrying push for biomarker based diagnosis??

t.co/aV2HeJddnn

Great to have our review now out & freely accessible in @AnnualReviews :

‘Apathy and Motivation: Biological Basis and Drug Treatment’

www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1...