Sharing Advice that We Give to People with Parkinson’s Disease

April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month, and April 11th is World Parkinson’s Day. To mark these occasions, Journal of Parkinson’s Disease is launching a new manuscript submission category in our April 2024 issue titled “Advice to People with Parkinson’s in My Clinic”.

There are some remarkable commonalities in our experiences within movement disorders clinics around the world. Notably, whether in Toronto, Nijmegen, or elsewhere, people with Parkinson’s and their partners or family members ask very similar questions of their neurologists and other health care providers. Many of these questions literally have textbook answers. Yet others do not have answers that are clear cut, often because the area of research is relatively nascent or under-investigated and thus the body of scientific evidence is still emerging. Providing accurate and useful advice can be complicated by the immense amount of correct and incorrect information that people obtain from mainstream media, social media, and other internet sources. Thus, longer and more nuanced discussions are sometimes needed to provide people with the appropriate advice. However, another commonality among most movement disorders clinics is that the amount of available time during typical visits is limited [2].

Our new section “Advice to People with Parkinson’s in My Clinic” is intended to facilitate the sharing of helpful, pragmatic advice by offering succinct summaries of the evidence (both available and lacking) and the personal approach used by experts in the field for these common questions that presently lack quick and straightforward answers. We invited Corcos and colleagues to write the first article for this category, “Advice to People with Parkinson’s in My Clinic: Exercise” [3], which is published in this current issue of Journal of Parkinson’s Disease. In addition, we already have invited other experts to write on additional topics including cannabis, Mucuna pruriens, and probiotics/prebiotics. These are intended to be trusted resources for patients and high yield summaries for health care providers who do not have the time to keep up with the literature on all topics.

While we as editors proactively invited authors for the initial set of manuscripts, Journal of Parkinson’s Disease welcomes new unsolicited submissions for this category. We are seeking submissions around clinically relevant questions that commonly arise in daily clinical practice but for which there is at this point insufficient scientific evidence to make a definitive recommendation. We request that the structure for the title follow that of “Advice to People with Parkinson’s in My Clinic: Exercise”. For the structure of the text itself, we allow a fair degree of flexibility, but we recommend that it starts by describing the clinical question and why it is a commonly occurring problem in clinical practice, and then focuses on discussing what evidence is available but also highlighting the lack thereof. Importantly, each manuscript should end with a dedicated section with the header “What we tell people with Parkinson’s in our clinic” and that contains practical guidance for how to handle the issue at hand during a conversation in daily clinical practice.

The typical word count for articles in this category is approximately 1500 words, but we are open to considering a longer article if the topic warrants a fuller review and discussion. Additional details can be found in the submission guidelines on the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease website [3]. We look forward to submissions from clinics around the globe, and we welcome readers’ feedback.