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Canada’s Globe & Mail interviews Michael J. Fox on his Foundation

Michael J. Fox sits down with the Globe and Mail to talk about Parkinson Disease and his research foundation. The foundation demands that scientists share results and tools, and it closely monitors their work. But it also encourages them to take risks, devoting roughly $2-million a year to a rapid-response…

Tyler’s Hope Comprehensive Care Center Website Launch

Together with Tyler’s Hope for a Dystonia Cure, the UFMDC invites you to view our new dystonia website dedicated to our Comprehensive Dystonia Care Center. Our team includes specialized physicians, a physician assistant, nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists, psychologists, researchers as well as other interdisciplinary specialists.

UF scientists construct ‘off switch’ for Parkinson therapy

Please read the complete article here. Excerpts follow: Together, the findings suggest that gene therapy to enable the brain to retain its ability to produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter that falls in critically short supply in Parkinson’s patients, could be safely attempted during earlier stages of the disease…

Dystonia Awareness Day on Twitter

The Dystonia Medical Research Foundation (DMRF) has a Twitter account and they put out the call for dystonia sufferers and anyone else to tweet about dystonia on one particular day, July 22nd. Twitter is a messaging system limited to 140 characters that a lot of individuals are using, mostly as…

Dystonia and DBS article from Palm Beach Post

This is an older article from the Palm Beach Post in 2007 about one of our patients. One mother’s walking miracle – By Rachel Sauer – Sunday, May 13, 2007 Excerpt: “Please,” Viviana remembers pleading. “Please. We can’t do this anymore.” Sharma called Dr. Michael Okun, a neurologist at Shands…

FGATIR – New imaging method for visualizing DBS targets developed at UF

We have recently developed and employed a Fast Gray Matter Acquisition T1 Inversion Recovery (FGATIR – pronounced F-gator) 3T MRI sequence to more reliably visualize the structures targeted in deep brain stimulation. You can see comparative screenshots of the FGATIR vs T1 and T2 FLAIR on the FGATIR page.

Experimental Parkinson’s therapy may have robust weight-loss effect

Excerpt from UF Health Science Center News Article: A growth factor used in clinical experiments to rescue dying brain cells in Parkinson patients may cause unwanted weight loss if delivered to specific areas of the brain, according to University of Florida researchers in the March online edition of Molecular Therapy.

The sweet spot? UF doctors test targets for Parkinson surgery

Excerpt from UF Health Science Center News article: Doctors may be able to tailor a specialized form of brain surgery to more closely match the needs of Parkinson patients, according to results from the first large-scale effort to compare the two current target areas of deep brain stimulation surgery, or…