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The creative process of art making may have significant therapeutic implications for individuals affected by Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer’s dementia, affecting approximately 10 million people worldwide. Parkinson’s disease is characterized by the progressive appearance of highly disabling symptoms, such as slowness, postural abnormalities, and gait difficulties. In addition, patients with Parkinson’s may experience a broad array of non-motor features, including depression, anxiety, apathy, and visual deficits. Available pharmacological treatments are aimed at symptomatic management. While generally effective for some of the disease symptoms, these treatments do not address the underlying progression of the disease which eventually worsens over time, thus progressively reducing patients’ quality of life. In this setting, increasing experimental attention has been recently paid towards complementary approaches like art therapy considering their potential to improve patient’s quality of life. An original research project was recently conducted at the department of Neurology of the New York University School of Medicine, including 18 patients with mild to moderate disease. The study was supported by the Kellar Family Foundation (grant ID#C17-00191) and led by Alberto Cucca M.D., a movement disorders neurologist who is also a first year PhD student at the doctoral program in Neural and Cognitive Neurosciences of the Department of Life Sciences of our University. The study examined the effects of 20 sessions of art therapy through an extensive battery of clinical, psychological, and behavioral assessments, including a characterization of patients’ ocular behavior by means of a dedicated eye-tracking device. Patients were also tested with resting-state functional MRI (fMRI), a sophisticated brain imaging technique investigating potential changes in neural functional connectivity induced by the treatment. Art therapy projects mostly involved the creation of visual artifacts, such as paintings, drawings, and murals. The preliminary results from the study were recently published in a specialized international peer-reviewed medical journal (link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353802021000298).

Following art therapy, significant improvements were noted in patient’s visuospatial functions, eye-movements patterns, but also general motor function. Furthermore, an increased connectivity between neural networks involved in the processing of visual information was also observed (see figure). The authors hypothesized that the observed gains in patients’ motor functions may be driven by their improved perceptual skills. In other words, a more reliable and accurate visual perception induced by repeated art therapy training may explain, at least to some extent, why patients’ motor performance improved. These findings introduce the intriguing research question regarding the clinical link between perception and movement. The potential implications of Dr. Cucca’s project were also specifically highlighted by the opening editorial of the last issue of Parkinsonism and Related Disorders (see link: https://www.prd-journal.com/article/S1353-8020(21)00037-7/fulltext). The next steps of Dr. Cucca’s PhD project will be aimed to characterize the specific effects induced by creative art interventions on patients’ motor function through different techniques involving dedicated computerized kinematic analyses.

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