Brain

Hello everybody, welcome to the Brain Podcast where we highlight some of the amazing science from the journal Brain and its sister journal Brain Communications.

My name is Dr Michael David, Academic Clinical Fellow at Imperial College London, co-host of the podcast with Adam Handel, Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Oxford.

Today's episode features a paper published in the August 2026 issue of the journal Brain, entitled Vaccines mimicking conformational epitopes on alpha-synuclein fibrils provide immunity to Parkinson's disease.

We're very pleased to have Erdem Tanganoy, Professor of Biochemistry at Dusseldorf University, to discuss the findings of the paper.

We'll talk about whether vaccines that recognise the disease-causing shape of alpha-synuclein could one day stop Parkinson's before symptoms begin.

This work has not been published yet and work for tau is on the way.

a promising and positive place to end.

Thank you very much to EDM for joining us to discuss the wonderful paper titled Vaccines Mimicking Confirmational Epitopes of Alpha-Synuclein Fibrils Provide Ability to Parkinson's Disease, published in the August 2026 issue of the journal Brain.

The winner of the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Editor-in-chief of Brain, one of the most respected journals in neurology.

Why ought the person right now pay attention to your finding?

That circuit we found in David that links the basal ganglia to the frontal lobes-

That's what I study.

Secondly, uh, I'm also a clinical neurologist, so, you know, I look after patients, so I have to interact with people in a way which I think requires certain skills to first of all extract information that you need that might be helpful in understanding what's going wrong with somebody, and also thinking about treatments.

But in my other life, I'm also the editor-in-chief of a big journal called Brain.

Uh, we get about 100 new submissions, new papers every week that we have to look through, and of those, perhaps, you know, eight of them will make it into the journal.

And for today's discussion, nausea.

So in fact, there was a study published in Headache, the journal of head and face pain, that examines people who routinely experience symptoms before migraine pain.

And the researchers found that nausea was one of the most commonly reported premenitory symptoms.

And among the 20 participants interviewed, 17 reported nausea.

It helps coordinate thirst, body temperature, hormonal rhythms, and other aspects of internal balance.

And so migraine appears to have an unusually close relationship with these systems.

In 2014, there was a landmark brain imaging study published in the journal Brain, and it was led by Peter Godsby and colleagues, and it examined people during experimentally triggered migraine attacks.

And so importantly, they scanned participants during the premonitory phase.