Professor Pamela McCombe and Miss Ji Hyun Julia Yang

MS Base: the value of contributing to big data 

Presented by Professor Pamela McCombe

MBBase is a large international database of patients with MS. This powerful database has been useful in conducting virtual clinical trials and answering vital questions about the benefits of treatment. It has also been linked with other databases to give very large numbers of patients 

Professor Pamela McCombe is a practicing Neurologist, Professor and Head of the Royl Brisbane Clinical school in the School of Medicine, and Group Leader in Neuroimmunology at UQ Centre for Clinical Research.

fMRI markers for cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease

Presented by Miss Ji Hyun Julia Yang

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is widely recognised as a movement disorder, although non-motor symptoms such as cognitive dysfunction detrimentally impact PD patients’ quality of life and contribute to a high disease burden. PD patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are at greater risk of developing dementia than PD patients without MCI. This seminar will present a study aimed at identifying impairment in functional brain networks associated with attention in Parkinson’s disease patients with MCI. We used a well known paradigm, The Attention Network Task to elicit brain regions associated with alerting, orientation and executive attentional impairments. Our results showed that PD-MCI patients show impairment brain function relating to alerting attention. We established fMRI markers relevant to alerting attention in PD-MCI.

Miss Julia Yang completed her PhD thesis under principal supervision of Dr Nadeeka Dissanayaka. Her research conducted at the Dementia & Neuro Mental Health Research Unit UQCCR focuses on understanding characteristics and identifying markers for mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).