Claire Shepard

The diagnosis improved.

It was more likely to have a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease if they then developed dementia.

Because we know Parkinson's disease cases often live quite a long time and then will develop dementia.

So that improved accuracy.

But that's later on.

And patients need that diagnosis early.

And so we really need brain banks.

We really need to collect the brains of these individuals so we can study them, so we can develop better biomarkers.

whether that be a blood biomarker, to look at these proteins that are in the brain and identify them in the blood in life earlier on in disease so that we can approve diagnosis for individuals as soon as possible.

I mean, people with a Parkinsonian syndrome will often be trialled on some of the Parkinson's drugs, but their response to that will often be milder to those with Parkinson's disease and the effects of drugs will wear off.

And so that will give a clue that they've not really got Parkinson's disease.

It's certainly not great giving older people

new drugs because the more medications they take, the more complications arise out of that.

But unfortunately, we haven't got the better biomarkers to be able to distinguish those individuals yet to help clinicians to definitively diagnose them.

Well, I mean, I think it's important to recognise that

Parkinson's disease, I mean, in our BrainBank cohort, we see misdiagnosis rates of 9%.

So they're a bit lower than those that we're seeing in this global study.

And that's reassuring.

And most of these disorders have been diagnosed by extremely specialised clinicians that just have great experience in distinguishing some of these disorders.

So seeing an individual that's got great experience