Researchers have developed a way to diagnose Parkinson’s disease early, before symptoms begin to appear, so that treatment can be started and the search for a cure can be accelerated.
There is currently no specific test to diagnose Parkinson’s disease, which is why diagnosis is so difficult, she says Watchman.
Accumulation of abnormal proteins
The symptoms can be different and many other diseases have similar symptoms, which means that the disease is often misdiagnosed.
Parkinson’s disease is caused by the buildup of abnormal proteins called alpha-synuclein throughout the brain and nervous system.
The buildup is thought to begin several years before physical symptoms such as tremors, muscle stiffness, and slowed movement appear.
Scientists in the US now say they have found a way to identify the buildup of abnormal proteins associated with the disease, long before symptoms appear.
Paving the way for a new treatment
The research appears to confirm that the method, called the alphaSyn-SAA seed amplification assay, can accurately identify people at risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.
The discovery could mean that the disease can be caught and diagnosed early and pave the way for new treatment.
The incidence of Parkinson’s disease has doubled
The incidence of Parkinson’s disease has doubled globally in the past 25 years and nearly 10 million people suffer from the disease.
“Identifying an effective biomarker for the pathology of Parkinson’s disease could have profound implications for how we treat the condition, making it possible to diagnose people earlier, determine the best treatments for different subsets of patients, and speed up clinical trials,” he says. Andrew Sideroff for the Guardian.
He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the new the study which included 1123 subjects and is therefore the largest so far to evaluate alphaSyn-SAA technology.
He confirms that the technology detects the disease
The study confirmed that the technology can accurately detect people with Parkinson’s disease, and also indicates that the technology can identify individuals at risk as well as people with early symptoms that have not yet been noticed.
However, the researchers believe that to fully assess the technology’s usefulness, more long-term studies with larger sample sizes are needed.
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Read more: Pioneering new treatment for Parkinson’s disease [Dagens PS]
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