Jan Petter Larsen, MD, PhD, is the director of The Norwegian Centre for Movement Disorders and has affiliations as professor of neurology at the universities of Bergen and Stavanger in Norway. He has a long record in clinical epidemiological research in Parkinson’s disease and his research group has for several years had a focus on non-motor problems. The research group is working with both clinical epidemiology, and translational and basic research. Prof. Larsen is the initiator and principal investigator of the Norwegian ParkWest study, which is a large longitudinal cohort study of patients with newly diagnosed Parkinson’s disease and a control group. The main objective of the study is to describe the symptomatic development of the disease over 10 years and to study possible biological measures that may influence the disease development.