movement disorders

And, and do you want to tell us a bit about the, um, Art Inquiry Lab? What, what, what's the idea behind it? What, what's happening?

The Art Inquiry Lab is, um, transdisciplinary arts and health research lab that is based at Radboud UMC, uh, Expertise Center for Parkinson's and Movement Disorders in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

It's funded by Blanca Spee, and the clinical head is Bastiaan Bloem.

And it sits kind of in the intersection of neuroscience, arts, and clinical care, and is pretty much asking how creativity and aesthetic engagement can, um, shape brain function, wellbeing, and quality of life.

Yes.

But I think Allie had a good question before we started recording around, was it around strep-associated movement disorders, Allie?

No, it wasn't actually.

Do you

Let's do this first, and then you can go back to it.

You can talk about any...

really quickly before don gets the floor i just want to say i feel like we learn that sydenham's chorea is a known neurological phenomenon associated with streptococcus infection and then we have pandas and then there's movement disorders associated with it and we're like no way no how that's just an observation as a neuromuscular provider i've never understood uh you know, the distinction there from a pathophysiological standpoint.

So ignore my question.

So they overestimate how prevalent their tremor is.

In a functional tremor or other functional movement disorders, there's an attentional deficit and patients will tend to massively overestimate how prevalent their movement disorder is.

They might say 90% and actually it's only 10%.

So that's one area where the subjective experience of the motor of the movement disorder is helpful.

All right, now why is this such a big deal in Parkinson's specifically? All right, let's take a look at the science.

Researchers in movement disorders have put Nordic walking through some rigorous clinical trials, and the results are pretty remarkable.

For instance, there was a landmark study published in the journal Movement Disorders in 2011 that evaluated Parkinson's patients over a six-week training program and found that Nordic walking significantly improved walking speed, functional mobility, and and quality of life compared to standard walking.

That's pretty impressive.

Next, there was a study that was published in 2014 that demonstrated how structured physical exercise programs that included Nordic walking significantly improved cognitive aspects of movement preparation, cued reaction times, and gait variability.