Parkinson’s Disease: Brain Network Identified as Key to New Treatments

A newly identified brain network, dubbed the somato-cognitive action network (SCAN), is offering a potential breakthrough in understanding and treating Parkinson’s disease. The discovery, stemming from an international collaboration led by China’s Changping Laboratory and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, redefines the neurological basis of the disease and opens avenues for more precise therapies.

Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder, affects over 1 million people in the United States and more than 10 million worldwide. Symptoms range from the well-known tremors and movement difficulties to sleep disturbances and cognitive impairments. While current treatments, including long-term medication and invasive deep brain stimulation (DBS), can manage symptoms, they do not halt the disease’s progression or offer a cure.

The research, published in February 4, 2026 in Nature, points to dysfunction within the SCAN as a core driver of the disease. This network, first described in 2023 by researchers at WashU Medicine, resides within the motor cortex – the brain region responsible for controlling body movements. It’s crucial for translating intentions into actions and processing feedback during movement execution.

“This work demonstrates that Parkinson’s is a SCAN disorder, and the data strongly suggest that if you target the SCAN in a personalized, precise manner you can treat Parkinson’s more successfully than was previously possible,” explained co-author Nico U. Dosenbach, MD, PhD, a professor of neurology at WashU Medicine.

The study’s findings reveal that Parkinson’s disease is characterized by hyperconnectivity – an overabundance of connections – between the SCAN and the subcortex, the brain region involved in emotion, memory, and motor control. This abnormal wiring appears to disrupt not only movement but also cognitive and other bodily functions. Researchers found that all four therapies included in the study – DBS, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), focused ultrasound stimulation, and medication – were most effective when they reduced this hyperconnectivity, normalizing activity within the SCAN.

Hesheng Liu, the study’s senior author, explained the rationale behind investigating the SCAN. “Given that Parkinson’s disease causes a broad range of symptoms, affecting bodily functions such as movement, digestion, and sleep as well as cognition and motivation, we teamed up to explore whether dysfunction of SCAN, which links cognition with movement, could explain Parkinson’s disease symptoms and serve as a target for treatment.”

To investigate this connection, Liu’s team analyzed brain imaging data from over 800 participants across institutions in the US and China. This group included individuals with Parkinson’s disease undergoing various treatments, as well as healthy controls and patients with other movement disorders.

Based on these findings, the researchers developed a new precision treatment system capable of targeting the SCAN non-invasively with millimeter accuracy. They tested this system using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate brain activity. In a clinical trial involving 18 patients, SCAN-targeted TMS demonstrated a 56% response rate after two weeks, significantly higher than the 22% response rate observed in a control group receiving stimulation to adjacent brain areas – a 2.5-fold increase in efficacy.

“Changing the activity within SCAN could slow or reverse the progression of the disease, not just treat the symptoms,” Dosenbach stated, highlighting the potential for disease-modifying therapies.

The non-invasive nature of TMS offers a significant advantage over current treatments like DBS, which requires brain surgery. “With noninvasive treatments, we could start treating with neuromodulation much earlier than is currently done with DBS,” Dosenbach noted.

Further research is planned to explore how different components of the SCAN influence specific Parkinson’s symptoms. Dosenbach is involved in clinical trials with Turing Medical, a WashU Medicine startup, to test a noninvasive treatment using surface electrode strips over SCAN regions to address gait dysfunction in Parkinson’s patients. He also intends to investigate modulating the SCAN with low-intensity focused ultrasound, another noninvasive brain stimulation technique.

This research represents a significant shift in understanding Parkinson’s disease, moving away from a purely movement-focused view to one that recognizes the critical role of a broader brain network in the disease’s manifestation and progression. The identification of the SCAN and the development of targeted therapies offer hope for more effective and personalized treatments for individuals living with Parkinson’s disease.