The “ExplorARTPD Study”
The process of making art involves the use of perceptual skills such as visual imagery, spatial reasoning, shape recognition, and spatial proportions. Compared to the general population, visual artists exhibit superior visual memory, attention to details and ability to isolate out of focus elements within the visual scene.
At the Marlene and Paolo Fresco Institute for Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders, we hypothesized that the process of art making may be purposefully used to train visual skills in patients with Parkinson’s disease, with clinical benefits potentially extending to patients’ motor function and psycho-social wellbeing. To test our hypothesis, in 2016 we developed the “ExplorARTPD Study”, an interdisciplinary and collaborative research initiative conducted in partnership with the Graduate Art Therapy Program at NYU Steinhardt and the Visuomotor Integration lab at Rusk.
Our preliminary results suggest significant improvements in subjects’ capability to extract relevant visual information when embedded into complex sensory patterns and to recognize differences between similar visual stimuli by relying on more efficient scanning eye movements. In addition, we observed significant improvements in patients’ general motor function and psychosocial wellbeing. Importantly, the observed clinical improvements were accompanied by significant changes in brain functional connectivity highlighting a dynamic reorganization of neural networks within the visual system, overall supporting the beneficial role of art therapy in improving perception and clinical function in our patients.
On my attendance to the WPC Congress in Kyoto
In 2019, while I was still a movement disorders fellow, I had the amazing opportunity to present an abstract on the preliminary results of our art therapy project at the 5th World Parkinson Congress in Kyoto, Japan. This turned out to be a great opportunity for my professional and personal growth, as I had the chance to highlight our study results while receiving insightful feedbacks from some of the most reputed experts of the field. Since then, we were able to further expand our project by enrolling three more cohorts of patients and by adding more refined outcomes in order to capture even subtle clinical and psychological changes.
I completed my fellowship training at NYU in July 2019, when I decided to move back to my country of origin, Italy. I like to think that, in some ways, this research project allowed me to reconcile the two greatest passions of my life: the devotion towards the medical profession and the love for art. Sadly, my country was among the most severely affected by the surge of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic last February. In this setting, many research activities, including the projects I was working on, were considerably delayed.
Thanks to the immense sacrifice and dedication of many health professionals and to the outstanding collaboration of the vast majority of the population, my country was able to gradually emerge from the dreadful situation we faced at the beginning of the outbreak. I now look forward to resuming my research activities and to being able to show how creative therapies like art therapy indeed hold rehabilitative potential for people affected by Parkinson’s.
The unique opportunity I had to attend the World Parkinson Congress in Kyoto and the wonderful memories I hold from that experience have convinced me even more of the necessity to explore different ways to improve the quality of life of people suffering from Parkinson’s. I aim to put my best efforts, as a neurologist and clinical scientist, to advance the current understanding of this destructive disease, which may affect an individual’s life on so many different and yet interconnected levels.
Alberto Cucca, MD is a Movement Disorders fellowship-trained neurologist currently working as clinical researcher at the Villa Margherita Fresco Parkinson Institute in Vicenza, Italy. Dr. Cucca also holds a position as adjunct professor of Neurology at NYU School of Medicine, where he currently works as Principal Investigator of the “ExplorArtPD” study.
This research was first shared as an abstract at the WPC 2019 in Kyoto. WPC is pleased to support abstract authors by sharing their ongoing work. Digital files of WPC abstract books can be downloaded from the past three Congresses HERE.
Ideas and opinions expressed in this post reflect that of the author(s) solely. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the World Parkinson Coalition®