Reflections from the World Parkinson Congress 2026

The World Parkinson Congress was really vibrant, and it was great to see such a strong showing of Parkinson’s-UK funded researchers and healthcare professionals as well as lots of people from the Parkinson’s community over the 4 days. Here are some of the key areas that stood out over the event.

Earlier and better diagnosis

At the moment Parkinson’s is diagnosed based on the typical symptoms - slowness of movement, stiffness and tremor. But we know that those symptoms only appear once 50 to 70% of the dopamine-producing brain cells have already been lost or damaged.

A new test has been developed which uses a lumbar puncture to detect the toxic form of alpha-synuclein, a protein associated with Parkinson’s, in fluid around the spine. We know that if you have that version of alpha-synuclein then it's pretty certain that you've got Parkinson's, even before symptoms appear.

The test isn’t yet ready to be used in the clinic, but there's lots of work going on to make it more sensitive. In the future, a blood test could identify not just the presence of alpha-synuclein, but also where someone is in the progression of Parkinson's, and what type of Parkinson's they have.

If we can identify and treat Parkinson's earlier, we have a much better chance of stopping it or slowing it down. And if we can identify types of Parkinson's, rather than just lumping everybody together into one group, we can treat people more precisely and effectively.

Read more about early diagnosis on our research blog.

Better tests

At the moment we don't have a good way of measuring whether potential treatments really work because Parkinson's progresses slowly, and varies so much from person to person.

We test things like how quickly people can tap their fingers together or get out of a chair, but that can vary so much from day to day. So those tests are very blunt instruments for trying to understand whether a treatment is slowing down progression.

If we had a biological test that could tell us really what's going on with the biology of the condition, that would speed up the search for new and better treatments.

Dr Kathleen Poston, one of the researchers speaking at the event, likened the tests that we have now to the first ever iPhone: it's much better than the previous phones that we had, but it's still not great. We're at the first generation of these tests, but they're going to improve very rapidly to get to the point that we can use them in clinics.

Read more about the progress towards better tests on our blog.

More therapies in the pipeline

We heard about the huge increase in the number of therapies designed to slow or stop Parkinson’s getting worse that are currently in the pipeline, and that more and more of them are getting to the later stages of clinical trials - phases 2 and 3.

There was discussion about prasinezumab, the new drug being explored by pharmaceutical company Roche, which looks very promising and has just entered the last phase of clinical trials. The ACTIVATE trial run by Bial is testing a GCase activator, which works on an enzyme that's very important in cellular recycling. The results for that trial are due later this year.

We're also eagerly awaiting the results from the NOPARK trial which was looking at a food supplement called nicotinamide riboside. It’s meant to work by boosting energy levels and helping mitochondria make energy, which we know is something that goes wrong in Parkinson's. Those results should be coming out this year as well. 

Gender and exercise

On the final day, we heard all about exercise and Parkinson's.

One of the things that researchers are studying is epigenetic changes: things in our lifestyle or our environment which can change the way our genes are working in our bodies.

Exercise is one of those things which can change which genes are turned on or off. They found completely different epigenetic changes in men compared to women.

It shows how important it is that we include both men and women, and male and female animals, in research and that we don't just lump them all together. We need to look where the differences are as it might reveal things that we would otherwise miss.

We also heard from US based researcher Daniel Corcos, who is leading a large study looking at whether high intensity exercise might be able to slow down the progression of Parkinson’s. The study is currently underway.

Read more about this in our blog about physical activity and research.