Project overview
People with Parkinson's often have difficulties moving, turning and walking. An innovative and potentially promising way of enhancing standard rehabilitation has emerged in recent years and is called transcranial direct current stimulation. This is a painless and non-invasive form of brain stimulation; two electrodes are placed on the head for 15 minutes of stimulation. We wish to test the potential of this method to improve the way people with Parkinson's move around in everyday life. To date, only one group of researchers have used this method and they showed an improvement in the movements of people with Parkinson's. We propose to further investigate this technique; we will measure standing up from sitting, turning and walking before and after brain stimulation. We will test people who are in either the earlier or later stage of Parkinson's and we will look at differences between the way they move during their best and worse times in between taking medication. We would like to include 20 people with Parkinson's who will be invited to visiting Southampton General Hospital on four occasions (approximately 2 hours once every week for four weeks). We need to evaluate the technique in order to understand the potential for enhancing the current treatment of people with Parkinson's. Established motor treatment such as physiotherapy could be complemented by this form of brain stimulation to further improve the quality of moving, turning and walking in Parkinson's.