Robust, effective treatments for Parkinson's freezing of gait remain elusive. Our previous study revealed beneficial effects of highfrequency rTMS over the supplementary motor area. The present study aims to explore the neural mechanisms of rTMS treatments utilizing novel exploratory multivariate approaches. We first conducted a resting-state functional MRI study with a group of 40 Parkinson's disease patients with freezing of gait, 31 without freezing of gait, and 30 normal controls. A subset of 30 patients with freezing of gait (verum group: N = 20; sham group: N = 10) who participated the aforementioned rTMS study underwent another scan after the treatments. Using the baseline scans, the imaging biomarkers for freezing of gait and Parkinson's disease were developed by contrasting the connectivity profiles of patients with freezing of gait to those without freezing of gait and normal controls, respectively. These two biomarkers were then interrogated to assess the rTMS effects on connectivity patterns. Results showed that the freezing of gait biomarker was negatively correlated with Freezing of Gait Questionnaire score (r = −0.6723, p < 0.0001); while the Parkinson's disease biomarker was negatively correlated with MDS-UPDRS motor score (r = −0.7281, p < 0.0001). After the rTMS treatment, both the freezing of gait biomarker (0.326 ± 0.125 vs. 0.486 ± 0.193, p = 0.0071) and Parkinson's disease biomarker (0.313 ± 0.126 vs. 0.379 ± 0.155, p = 0.0378) were significantly improved in the verum group; whereas no significant biomarker changes were found in the sham group. Our findings indicate that high-frequency rTMS over the supplementary motor area confers the beneficial effect jointly through normalizing abnormal brain functional connectivity patterns specifically associated with freezing of gait, in addition to normalizing overall disrupted connectivity patterns seen in Parkinson's disease.

Proper diagnosis and treatment are unavailable to many dementia patients because of a lack of dementia doctors and memory clinics in China.

Paroxysmal dyskinesias are a group of neurological diseases characterized by intermittent episodes of involuntary movements with different causes. Paroxysmal kinesigenic dyskinesia (PKD) is the most common type of paroxysmal dyskinesia and can be divided into primary and secondary types based on the etiology. Clinically, PKD is characterized by recurrent and transient attacks of involuntary movements precipitated by a sudden voluntary action. The major cause of primary PKD is genetic abnormalities, and the inheritance pattern of PKD is mainly autosomal-dominant with incomplete penetrance. The proline-rich transmembrane protein 2 (PRRT2) was the first identified causative gene of PKD, accounting for the majority of PKD cases worldwide. An increasing number of studies has revealed the clinical and genetic characteristics, as well as the underlying mechanisms of PKD. By seeking the views of domestic experts, we propose an expert consensus regarding the diagnosis and treatment of PKD to help establish standardized clinical evaluation and therapies for PKD. In this consensus, we review the clinical manifestations, etiology, clinical diagnostic criteria and therapeutic recommendations for PKD, and results of genetic analyses in PKD patients performed in domestic hospitals.