Amsterdam, July 22, 2024 – Until now, Parkinson’s disease has been diagnosed clinically and fairly late in the course of the disease. There is an urgent need to find an objective and measurable biomarker to diagnose this highly prevalent movement disorder. Researchers have now found preliminary evidence that a blood test for the protein alpha-synuclein is a viable and less invasive option for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease. Stady appears in Parkinson’s Disease Journalpublished by IOS Press, now part of Sage.
“In recent years, it has been shown that the highly pathologically relevant protein alpha-synuclein, which accumulates in nerve cells, can also be detected in various body fluids and tissues of individuals with Parkinson’s disease, for example in the cerebrospinal fluid or in skin tissue,” say lead researchers Dr. Annika Klug and Dr. Eva Schaefer, from the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein, Campus Kiel and Kiel University in Kiel, Germany.
In a previous study, this research team was able to show that alpha-synuclein could also be detected in the blood of Parkinson’s patients by isolating small vesicles of neurons (neural exosomes) from the blood and amplifying the alpha-synuclein they contained using a seed amplification assay (SAA).
“With this current work, we aimed to confirm that this blood test can detect alpha-synuclein in a larger cohort of individuals with Parkinson’s disease and to clarify whether the amount of alpha-synuclein measured using SAA changes during the course of the disease,” adds Dr. Klug.
The researchers analyzed cross-sectional blood samples from Parkinson’s patients and compared them to samples from age- and sex-matched healthy controls using a blood-based SAA test. In this study, 79 of 80 Parkinson’s patients showed positive seeding for blood-derived alpha-synuclein, while none of the healthy controls showed a positive blood test. This confirms that the blood marker for alpha-synuclein is highly sensitive for Parkinson’s disease.
When comparing subgroups of Parkinson’s patients with different disease durations, longer disease duration was associated with lower alpha-synuclein activity, suggesting that alpha-synuclein activity changes over the course of the disease. It remains unclear whether alpha-synuclein activity changes during the natural course of the disease, and if so, how.
“There is currently no blood test available for Parkinson’s disease in clinical practice,” Dr. Schaefer and Dr. Klug conclude. “It is of course of utmost importance that the robust results of our cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses are validated and replicated in different laboratories. If a low seeding activity in the blood is confirmed, this could impact further studies and our understanding of the disease progression. In the long term, we hope that this blood test will be used to improve the safety and diagnostic reliability of Parkinson’s disease, even in early stages when clinical diagnosis is difficult. Furthermore, the impact on clinical studies must be considered, especially with regard to the possibility of antibody-based targeted therapies for Parkinson’s disease.”
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