Episode 78: Benefits of Self Awareness with PD

Self-awareness is an ability to focus on one’s own thoughts, actions, and emotions and evaluate and manage them according to what standards and values you set for yourself. Being self-aware from moment to moment can lead to better self-understanding and an ability to manage thoughts, emotions, strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and motivations, with a goal of a more peaceful existence. Fortunately, self-awareness can be learned and cultivated using some simple techniques. Dr. Carsten Eggers, Professor of Neurology and Co-director of the Parkinson’s Foundation Center of Excellence at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, discusses self-awareness and how health confidence, the confidence to be able to manage health problems, relates to it.

Released: April 7, 2020

Prof. Dr. Carsten Eggers, MD, Professor of Neurology, serves as the vice-chairman of the Department of Neurology, Phillips-University Marburg, Germany (2016 to present). He completed his medical studies in 2005 after visiting the University of Hamburg, Germany, University of Cologne, Germany and University René-Descartes V in Paris, France. His medical thesis was on “Implementation of an interactive informed consent programme before gastric banding in morbid obesity”. He completed his postgraduate education at the Department of Neurology in Cologne, Germany (Prof. Fink) with research projects in the Neuroelectrophysiological Lab of Prof. Rothwell, Institute of Neurology, Queens Square, London, UK and the Neuroimaging Lab at the Feinstein Institute for Neuroscience (Prof. Eidelberg). He received his board certification in 2011, his habilitation on “Neuroimaging of Parkinsonian Subtypes” was finalized in 2013. He was appointed as consultant of the Department of Neurology, Cologne, Germany in 2014.

His research focus are Neuroimaging of Movement Disorders, Neuropychological characeristics, symptoms and therapies of Parkinson’s Disease and integrative care research in Parkinson’s Disease. In this context he founded the Cologne Parkinson’s Network in 2011, where he established an extensive care programme with interactions between neurologists in private practice and the Department of Neurology of the University of Cologne. Since 2017 he chairs the MDS-task force on “Integrated Care in Movement Disorders” and since 2018 the German Parkinson Societies Work Group on Parkinson Networks. Since 2012 he is project leader of one project within the DFG-funded Clinical Research Group 219: “Basal-ganglia-cortex-loops: pathological interactions and their therapeutic modification” on “Connectivity changes as a pathological link between striatal and cortical changes within subtypes of Parkinson’s Disease”. He is the medical director of the Parkinson Center of Excellence and chairman of the Parkinson Network Alliance Marburg. He is author of >120 publications, including 70 peer-reviewed, and has an H-Index of 22.