Dr. Juergen Konczak, School of Kinesiology professor of biomechanics and neuromotor control, with colleagues from the Italian Institute of Technology, will soon be publishing the results of an international collaboration in the journal Brain.
Brain is one of the world’s leading journals in neurology with an impact factor of 9.46. Dr. Konczak, lead author on the paper, investigated how Parkinson’s disease alters haptic perception and the underlying neural mechanisms of somatosensory and sensorimotor integration. Haptic perception refers to the ability to sense the shape and texture of objects by touch and without sight.
Although Parkinson’s disease is considered a movement disorder, Konczak’s research suggests that the disease accelerates age-related decline in haptic perception by altering somatosensory integration — a neural mechanism that combines sensory information from the many receptors of the skin and muscles. That is, perception as well as movement is affected by the disease.