The findings suggest that iron deposition could be valuable to track if a treatment is working in a clinical trial, and might eventually be helpful for early diagnosis of Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr Weil has previously found in a 2019 study** that a suite of vision tests may be helpful to predict cognitive decline in Parkinson’s. She and her colleagues hope that further research will determine if the vision tests and iron measures could be helpful to predict which people with Parkinson's are likely to develop dementia.


First author, PhD student George Thomas (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology), said: “It’s really promising to see measures like this which can potentially track the varying progression of Parkinson’s disease, as it could help clinicians devise better treatment plans for people based on how their condition manifests.”

Co-author Dr Julio Acosta-Cabronero (Tenoke Ltd. and Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL) added: "We were surprised at how well the iron levels measured in different regions of the brain with MRI were correlated with cognitive and motor skills. We hope that brain iron measurement could be useful for a wide range of conditions, such as to gauge dementia severity or to see which brain regions are affected by other movement, neuromuscular and neuroinflammatory disorders, stroke, traumatic brain injury and drug abuse.”

The researchers are now following up the same study participants to see how their disease is progressing, whether they develop dementia, and how such measures correlate with changes in iron levels over time.

The study was supported by Wellcome, the National Institute for Health Research, the Medical Research Council, Parkinson’s UK, Movement Disorders Society, ESRC, and the Cure Parkinson’s Trust.

UCL dementia research gets funding boost

Neuroscience research at UCL has received a new boost with a £5 million grant from the Garfield Weston Foundation, supporting the planned development of a new world-leading neuroscience centre at UCL. The state-of-the-art new building*** will house over 500 neuroscientists from the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology as well as the research hub and operational headquarters of the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) – a nationwide collaboration to revolutionise the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of neurodegenerative disorders. It will also house outpatient consulting and an MRI suite for the UCLH National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.

The £5 million donation from The Foundation is their largest gift to UCL to date. They will be naming the Weston Conference Centre in the new building on Grays Inn Road, which will provide facilities to connect scientists and welcome visiting collaborators from across the UK and the world. It will be a crucial part of the new building which is a physical embodiment of UCL’s commitment to translational research and collaborative working to find solutions to some of society’s most devastating neurodegenerative diseases.

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