VIDEO

Beyond the diagnosis

Watch how one woman lives with Parkinson’s — and how another works to advance the science of this condition.

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For Rhonda Leaverton, her diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease arrived like a thunderclap. “My doctor said, ‘I think you have Parkinson’s. It’s treatable, but it’s not curable. Bam!’” she recalled. “It was just such a shock.”

A nurse since the age of 21, Rhonda had spent her life taking care of others. But the diagnosis placed her into a role she had never imagined. “It’s really hard for me to let people do things for me. I didn’t want to be dependent on anybody. That was the hardest part.”

According to research¹, Parkinson’s is one of the world’s fastest-growing neurological conditions, affecting nearly 12 million people in 2021 — a number expected to rise by roughly 50 percent by 2035. While current treatments can help manage symptoms, there is no cure for the disease. That urgent reality underscores the stakes for people like Rhonda — and why scientists and clinicians are pushing to better understand the condition.

Kim Pfleeger, Senior Scientific Director for Neuroscience Development at AbbVie, has a deeply personal connection to the disease. “My father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at about 42, so I was in high school,” she said. That experience, paired with a lifelong fascination with science, shaped her career path. “He motivates me, and his Parkinson’s diagnosis sparked my interest in neuroscience.”

As a chronic and progressive disorder, Parkinson’s, by its nature, is highly complex. “Most people think about motor symptoms such as tremors; that’s what you would notice outwardly. But there are other things that are not visible, like cognition issues,” Kim said. “Every single patient is different, their symptoms are different, the speed at which they progress is different.”

Studies have shown² that alongside these visible and invisible challenges, Parkinson’s can also bring depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, psychotic symptoms and cognitive decline — symptoms that profoundly shape quality of life and often become more pronounced as the disease progresses. These layers of complexity — and their deeply personal impact on patients like Rhonda — are exactly what drive scientists like Kim to keep pushing forward.

AbbVie supports Parkinson’s patients at every stage of their journey by working to discover and deliver treatments that address both early and advanced symptoms, and pursuing research to understand the underlying causes of disease progression.

To accelerate scientific discovery, researchers are searching for better biomarkers, building more accurate models of the disease, integrating genomics and real-world clinical data to discover and validate new potential drug targets, and leveraging feedback from patients and caregivers to improve clinical trial design and future research.

“People are at the heart of everything we do,” Kim said. “They are the reason we keep persevering in these spaces that are very challenging.”

For Rhonda, perseverance has meant redefining her life on her own terms. “There’s more answers out there. I’ve been able to live a life that I’ve wanted to live, full of happiness, family, traveling, dancing,” she said. Rhonda says she feels hope, in part, because she knows there are people like Kim working to find answers.

And in turn, it is patients like Rhonda who inspire Kim and AbbVie’s broader aim. “A lot of the conditions take a piece of that person away from them, whether it be movement, activity or cognition,” Kim said. “That’s what we strive to do, is try to preserve it as much as possible.”

That mission — restoring and preserving what disease can take away — keeps AbbVie’s scientists focused on the long game. “Finding a cure or treatments for Parkinson’s disease is not going to be a sprint,” Kim said. “It’s going to be a marathon. And we’re here for that marathon.”

Watch how Rhonda and Kim’s paths converge — and how perseverance, science and innovation are working to uncover what’s next for Parkinson’s.