(Charles) David Marsden (14 April 1938 – 29 September 1998), FRS[1] was a British neurologist who made a significant contribution to the field of movement disorders.
[3] His interest in this field started with his medical school thesis which was a comparative study of mammalian substantia nigra.
His later contributions include the complications of levodopa; the motor control physiology of dystonia, myoclonus, and essential tremor; the discovery of the mitochondrial defect in the substantia nigra in Parkinson's disease; and the use of fluorodopa positron emission tomography (PET) to study the growth of embryonic tissue transplants in Parkinson's disease.
He described several neurological conditions such as painful legs/moving toes, cortical and corticospinal myoclonus, and primary writing tremor.
He was instrumental in establishing dystonia as an organic disease rather than a hysterical condition, and made a major contribution to its classification.