Nico J. DiederichI am a clinical neurologist. I have studied at the Universities of Homburg/Saar and Bonn (Germany) and have trained in neurology at the University of Cologne (Germany) and at Rush University, Chicago (USA). I have written my doctoral thesis on the involvement of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in the genesis of hypertension and my “Habilitation” on non motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease (PD), with special emphasis on hallucinations and sleep fragmentation. I am presently “auβerplanmäβiger Professor” for Neurology at the University of Cologne (Germany) and I regularly teach at this University. As a Visiting Assistant Professor, I annually return to Rush University, Chicago for mini-sabbaticals. My clinical practice is at the CHL in Luxembourg-City (Luxembourg). While I treat inpatients and outpatients with any neurological condition, my scientific focus of interest are movement disorders and sleep disorders. My research team is involved in longitudinal studies on various non motor symptoms in early stages of PD and in network analysis of these symptoms. We study, among others, visual, olfactory, dysautonomic and sleep dysfunction. Recently, I have joined the LCSB as a Senior Clinical Researcher and I am presently setting up a translational research collaboration between the LCSB and the CHL, in order to examine different “omics” in PD, especially around mitochondrial dysfunction, and to correlate these findings with the clinical evolution of PD.
Six selected papers from 2009-2012:
1. Diederich NJ, McIntyre DJ. Sleep disorders in Parkinson's disease: Many causes, few therapeutic options. J Neurol Sci. 2012; 314:12-9.
2. Diederich NJ, Parent A. Parkinson's disease: Acquired frailty of archaic neural networks? J Neurol Sci. 2012; 314:143-51.
3. Antony PM, Diederich NJ, Balling R. Parkinson's disease mouse models in translational research. Mamm Genome. 2011; 22:401-19.
4. Sauvageot N; Vaillant M, Diederich NJ. Reduced Sympathetically Driven Heart Rate Variability during Sleep in Parkinson’s disease: A Case-Control Polysomnography-Based Study. Mov Disord. 2011; 26:234-40.
5. Diederich NJ, Hipp G, Peri V, Blyth S, Rufra O, Vaillant M. Discriminative power of different non motor signs in early Parkinson’s disease. A case-control study. Mov Disord. 2010; 25:882-7.
6. Diederich NJ, Fénelon G, Stebbins G, Goetz CG. Hallucinations in Parkinson disease. Nat Rev Neurol. 2009; 5:331-42.