Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a fatal and incurable degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that affects more than 6.3 million people worldwide. PD is initially associated with movement-related symptoms such as rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking and gait. As the disease progresses, cognitive and behavioral deficits can also occur. Despite increased interest, PD treatment options remain limited, and are associated with severe side effects and decreased efficacy over time. Here, our limited understanding of the cortical and subcortical circuits in the healthy brain which can be involved in PD is a significant obstacle to developing new PD treatment options: without fully understanding the healthy physiology of a structure in the brain, it is difficult to establish in PD how to return the diseased structure to a currently ambiguous healthy state. This study will address this obstacle by examining key structures which can be involved in PD, using the saccadic eye movement system in monkeys as a behavioral readout. A saccade is the fast movement of an eye, head, or other animal body part. The saccadic eye movement system is an excellent model for examining changes in the brain, because it is easy to measure, and there is considerable knowledge of the underlying neural circuitry which participates in controlling gaze. Deficits in saccadic eye movements in PD in many ways mirror observed PD motor deficits, and are also improved by current PD treatment options. Since recording eye movements is fast and inexpensive, the saccadic eye movement system is also practical to use in a clinical setting. By training monkeys to perform saccadic eye movements, this study will record interactions between specific areas of the brain involved in PD, in order to better understand the changes in the brain underlying this disorder.