Best Movement Disorders Specialists in Minnesota

Dr. Savica is a professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic and directs the Young-Onset Parkinson's Disease Clinic in Rochester. He sees patients whose Parkinson's shows up in their 40s or 50s — a group that often needs a different treatment plan than older patients because they will live with the disease for decades. His research has pushed the field to recognize that Parkinson's begins years before the first tremor, with clues like constipation, loss of smell, and REM sleep behavior changes ¹. His 2022 study on the incidence of Parkinson disease in North America ² is the current reference point for how common the disease actually is in the United States and Canada.

Dr. Bower is a professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic and one of the longest-serving Parkinson's specialists in Rochester. He used Mayo's Olmsted County records to map how often parkinsonism actually occurs in a typical American community ³, work that underpins most later prevalence estimates ⁴. He was also part of the team that first sounded the alarm on impulse-control problems from dopamine agonist drugs ⁵, including compulsive gambling — a side effect most patients and families had never been warned about. If you are weighing the trade-offs of Parkinson's medications, his clinic is a good place to get a candid read.

Dr. Coon is an associate professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic and a specialist in multiple system atrophy (MSA) and related conditions where the autonomic nervous system fails. MSA often looks like Parkinson's at first but gets worse faster and brings severe blood pressure drops, bladder problems, and fainting. Her work showed which clinical features and autonomic tests actually predict how long a patient will live with MSA ⁶, information families rely on to plan care. She also co-authored the national consensus statement on how the autonomic nervous system should be tested ⁷, and has published on autonomic symptoms that emerged after COVID-19 ⁸.

Dr. Tuite is a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota and practices through M Health Fairview in Minneapolis. He is one of the Twin Cities' primary destinations for Parkinson's and atypical parkinsonism and has kept a foot in research even while running a busy clinic. His imaging studies showed that Parkinson's brains develop measurable changes in the frontal lobe and basal ganglia that affect balance and movement sense ⁹, and he helped test whether antioxidant therapy with N-acetylcysteine can raise protective chemicals in the brain ¹⁰. For patients in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, he is often the specialist local neurologists refer complex cases to.

Dr. Litchy is a consultant in Mayo Clinic's Department of Neurology and one of the clinic's most experienced neuromuscular specialists. Movement problems don't always start in the brain — weakness from inclusion body myositis ¹¹, numbness from diabetic neuropathy, and pain from cervical radiculopathy ¹² can all look like a movement disorder at first. Dr. Litchy helped build the Rochester Diabetic Neuropathy Study [13, 14, 15], the long-running cohort that set the current standards for measuring nerve damage. If your neurologist isn't sure whether the trouble is in your brain or your peripheral nerves, he is the kind of specialist they send you to.

Dr. Dyck is a professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic who focuses on peripheral nerve disease, including the neuropathies that often complicate Parkinson's and other movement disorders by worsening balance and gait. He led the JAMA trial that repurposed diflunisal for familial amyloid polyneuropathy ¹⁶, a once-untreatable inherited disease, and co-authored the international consensus on quantitative sensory testing ¹⁷. His earlier population work on diabetic neuropathy ¹⁸ and inherited motor-sensory conditions ¹⁹ helped define how these nerve diseases are staged today. Ask for him when numbness, weakness, or balance problems don't fit a single diagnosis.