This free online course is aimed at anyone with an interest in finding out the fundamentals of Parkinson’s disease; how it affects people, what causes it, what we can do to try and ameliorate the symptoms and what we don’t yet know about it.

As one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases, most people at least know of one person who has Parkinson’s disease.

As the population ages, so the number of people with it will increase. Many people will be able to give a vague description of how that person is affected but may not know why. In this course we will consider how the normal principles of how neurones work and communicate are altered in the parkinsonian brain and why this leads to the symptoms that we see. We can then apply this knowledge to thinking about how current therapies work.

Finally we can think about where the holes in our knowledge are and the importance of this for improving our ability to alleviate the symptoms of the disease.

The course is aimed at anyone with an interest in finding out the fundamentals of Parkinson’s disease. You will need to have a basic knowledge of what the brain is made of, how these component cellular parts are organised and the principles of how these cells function normally. This would be appropriate for someone who has taken the course “Good brain, bad brain: basics” or who has studied neuroscience in the early years of their undergraduate degree.