We were delighted to learn that Dan has £195,000 from the MRC Gap Fund to continue the work on cognition in PSP and Parkinson’s disease. The project “Validation of the Specificity of the Bells Test for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy”, is a multi-centre collaboration between Dan in Durham Uni, Chrystalina Antonaides in Oxford, Claire McDonald and Nicola Pavese from Newcastle University, Louse Wiblin from South Tees NHSFT, James Fisher from Northumbria Healthcase NHSFT, Fionnuala Johnston from South Tyneside & Sunderland NHSFT and Boyd Ghosh in University Hospital Southampton NHSFT. We’ll also be working closely with Fiona Yelnoorkar and the NIHR RDN AGILE team, who will testing participants in thier homes or other community based settings.
The project aims to demonstrate that problems with visual search can be used to help with the diagnosis of PSP. Delayed diagnosis of PSP causes anxiety to patients, delays medical trials of new treatments and is costly for patients and the NHS. The results of our previous grant from the Vivensa foundation showed that the Bells test, a neuropsychological test usually used to screen for problems with attention, is also extremely accurate at classifying PSP and PD. This result suggests that Bells test performance could be a cognitive marker for PSP. However, the specificity of this marker must be validated in a new sample of patients with confirmed PSP in order to progress to large scale evaluation of the test sensitivity, and ultimately a prospective trial. Validation is particularly important as PSP is a rare disease, meaning full-scale trials requiremany non-diseased patients and are very costly. In the longer term, faster and more accurate diagnosis of PSP will reduce the costs of multiple hospital visits for carers and the NHS, give certaintyto patients and carers, help ensure patients have access to appropriate care pathways and can be a key enabler of trials of new drugs to treat PSP.
The project is due to start in April 2026
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