Brain donation for research

The National Centre of Excellence in Research on Parkinson's Disease (NCER-PD) is responsible for the first brain donation program in Luxembourg. NCER-PD collects the brains of participants in the Luxembourg Parkinson's Study who have decided to donate their brains to research after death.

The creation of this brain bank will strengthen the Luxembourg Parkinson's Study and may also be beneficial for other research projects. In the long term, this initiative should help to prevent neurological diseases, diagnose them earlier and treat them better.

If you would like to become a donor, we invite you to read the information on the website and register for the NCER-PD brain donation program. If you need further information or advice, please contact our team (+352 4411 4848 or parkinson@chl.lu). We will be happy to answer your questions and help you register.

How does brain donation work?

People with or without neurological diseases can choose to donate their brain for research purposes after their death. This is called brain donation. Such donations make an important contribution to research into neurological diseases: Once donated, tissue samples can be obtained from a single brain for numerous studies.

A brain bank includes all brains donated for research purposes. When a person decides to donate a brain after death, the tissue is removed post-mortem, prepared for future research purposes, and stored and preserved to the highest standards. The brain tissue is then made available, after approval by an experienced committee, to qualified scientists working on scientific questions in a neurological context. In doing so, the brain bank ensures compliance with ethical and scientific standards as well as the protection of the donor's privacy.

Why are brain donations so important?

Neurological diseases of the brain affect millions of people worldwide - for example, about 1,000 people suffering from Parkinson's disease live in Luxembourg alone. With an increasingly aging population structure, this number is expected to rise even further in the coming years. To date, there is still no cure for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's or even Alzheimer's disease. Therefore, further research is needed to understand the origin of these diseases and to develop new therapeutic methods.

Research still faces many unresolved questions about the structure and functioning of the human brain. In order to understand neurodegenerative diseases, the affected brain areas must be studied in detail. However, it is very difficult to study the brain of a living person: Biopsies of the brain are performed only in exceptional situations (for example, cancer), and even the latest imaging techniques do not provide sufficient resolution to study disease at the cellular level. Researchers are therefore forced to study human brain tissue after death.

A port-mortem analysis is the most direct way to track the changes in the brain that resulted from the onset of the disease. Moreover, it is the only way so far to make a reliable diagnosis of the presence of neurodegenerative diseases. Last but not least, the analysis of human brain samples is also necessary to develop new treatments and to understand what effects a possibly new treatment has had on the respective patient. However, the low number of donated brains is currently a major problem for medical progress. A higher number of donations and thus available tissue samples could greatly support the work of scientists to develop better diagnosis, treatment and prevention methods.