Home Department: Bioengineering
Mentor: Todd Coleman (Bioengineering)

“Characterizing Brain-Body Physiologic Patterns to Relate REM Sleep Behavior Disorder and Parkinson’s Disease"

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) affects 10 million people worldwide. Although PD is
typically thought of as a movement disorder, many PD patients exhibit sleep, autonomic, and gut problems before their motor symptoms occur. In fact, people with rapid eye movement behavior disorder (RBD) have an 80 percent chance of eventually developing PD. The purpose of Nisha’s project is to collect objective and non-invasive electrophysiologic measures of sleep, autonomic, and gut function in RBD and PD patients to better understand the disease trajectory and explore if novel treatments could be pursued based on this information.