President’s Letter

As the year draws to a close, I would firstly like to thank all MDS members for your support of and commitment to our organization. Together we have grown to over 12,000 members from over 150 countries, in all regions of the world. The MDS is incredibly grateful for your contributions, whether as one of the over 1,000 volunteers in our leadership, disease or skill-based, or research committees and groups, or one of the many thousands who have participated as speakers or attendees at our many in person and online courses.

Your MDS membership gives you the unique chance to be part of globally impactful research, advocacy, education, and more. And we continue to initiate new projects to advance our mission even further:

The MDS Officers have approved a project to develop a statement on an MDS Tiered Diagnostic Framework for Parkinson's disease. This project will aim to advance the current proposed biological frameworks, ideally working together in partnership with their proponents, and integrate them with existing clinical and other frameworks. Importantly, we hope to develop an adaptable framework that leaves open the possibility of incorporating new information and data as they become available. MDS intends to take a leadership role in the ongoing debate that is representative of the interests and circumstances of all of our members, in order to ensure global applicability and relevance to updated concepts of the definition and classification of Parkinson's disease.
MDS will pilot a patient and carer initiative, MDS Patients and Carers, to ensure we are including the voices of people we serve as we move the field forward. We will provide a reputable source for them to learn about emerging research, as well as keep a database of those who are interested in being part of MDS projects.

We hope these projects will build on our recent successes: The 2024 International Congress brought nearly 5,000 experts together to share knowledge and guide scientific decisions. Soon after, World Movement Disorders Day brought the importance of these complex and often misunderstood diseases to the forefront. This campaign reached hundreds of thousands worldwide, shining a spotlight on the importance of fighting stigma for people living with movement disorders.

If you live in the Asian-Oceanian region, I invite you to join our next event, the upcoming AOPMC in Tokyo, Japan from March 21-23. These regional meetings elevate priority issues specific to the area, while highlighting the latest global advancements.

I hope that you will see the value to yourself, colleagues, and our patient and carer communities in renewing your membership for 2025 to stay involved in these and other international efforts. We need and are grateful for your support and expertise.

And I hope you will become more involved. Now that study groups are open to all members, we are seeing an increase in collaborative research efforts. And later next year, you will have the opportunity to apply for committee and board positions across the organization for the next term. All of these roles play a key part in running the Society and advancing to our mission.

Congratulations to two members who are now serving the Society in a significant new capacity: Timothy Lynch and Davide Martino, the incoming editors of the Movement Disorders Clinical Practice journal. They have been preparing under the guidance of the outgoing founding editors, Kailash Bhatia and Marcelo Merello, whose contributions in establishing and growing the publication have built a legacy for the Society. We hope this will continue to thrive under the new leadership.

I wish you, your patients, your colleagues, and everyone across our Movement Disorders community the happiest of holidays, and look forward to a fruitful 2025 together.