CIEN Leads a Study Identifying Distinct Cognitive Profiles in Dementia Associated with Parkinson’s Disease

A team led by Michel Grothe, head of the Neuroimaging Platform at CIEN, has published a study in the prestigious journal NPJ Parkinson’s Disease (Nature Publishing Group), which innovatively characterizes cognitive subtypes in patients with Parkinson’s disease dementia (PDD).

The research was conducted in collaboration with the Movement Disorders Group of the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBiS) and features prominent contributions from Miguel Labrador-Espinosa, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and Jesús Silva-Rodríguez, coordinator of the Neuroimaging Platform at CIEN, who are listed as co-first authors of the article.

The study uses a data-driven approach to identify two clearly distinct cognitive profiles among patients with PDD: one characterized by predominant memory deficits, and another by predominant visuospatial deficits. These subtypes do not differ in overall dementia severity but do show differences in clinical symptoms and genetic factors, such as a higher prevalence of mutations in the GBA gene in the visuospatial subtype.

The findings underscore the need to move towards personalized medicine in Parkinson’s disease and reinforce CIEN’s role in leading-edge research on neurodegenerative diseases.

Article reference: Labrador-Espinosa MA, Silva-Rodríguez J, Mir P, Grothe MJ. Data-driven characterization of distinct cognitive subtypes in Parkinson’s disease dementia | npj Parkinson's Disease NPJ Parkinsons Dis. 2025 May 9;11(1):119. doi:10.1038/s41531-025-00970-9. PMID: 40346094.