Commonly prescribed for managing PD symptoms, dopamine replacement medications like levodopa can relieve muscle stiffness and slowness for patients. However, care providers have raised questions about the usefulness and effectiveness of dopamine replacement medications for managing facial expressivity and response. Rachel Schade, T32 Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration and graduate research assistant in the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and Dr. Dawn Bowers, director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab and professor in the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology and the Department of Neurology, recently published a paper in Movement Disorders Clinical Practice exploring the effectiveness of dopamine replacement medication on facial expressivity in people living with Parkinson’s. “We found that dopamine medications in fact did improve facial movement and expressions in patients living with Parkinson disease. This is important for two reasons. First, a masked...