Biochemical diagnosis of Parkinson's disease
December 2016
The University of Texas School of Medicine at Houston, Houston, USA
Parkinson's disease is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a massive dopaminergic loss that leads to motor and cognitive decline and, ultimately, death. Despite its high prevalence, there is a lack of diagnostic tools that allow a non-invasive biochemical evaluation to help in the early diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. One of the main pathological processes in Parkinson's disease is the accumulation of alpha-synuclein aggregates, which can be detected in small quantities in patients' cerebrospinal fluid. Here, a protein misfolding cyclic amplification is used to detect minimum amounts of alpha-synuclein aggregates, through a strategy of signal amplification. After the first validation with synthetic oligomers in vitro, this technique allowed for the identification of 88.5% of Parkinson's disease patients, with a specificity of 96.9% when using samples of patients with different neurodegenerative disorders. Additionally, the results of this test highly correlated with the severity of the disease. Here, the researchers propose a new non-invasive diagnostic approach to efficiently identify and discriminate Parkinson's patients, with a potential use in monitoring of the disease.
Development of a biochemical diagnosis of Parkinson disease by detection of α-synuclein misfolded aggregates in cerebrospinal fluid
Claudio Soto
Added on: 09-04-2021
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2588684[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
