Amsterdam, 22 July 2024 – To date, Parkinson’s disease (PD) is diagnosed clinically and relatively late in the disease course. There is an urgent need to find an objective and quantifiable biomarker for the diagnosis of this widespread movement disorder. Researchers have now found initial evidence that a blood test to detect the protein alpha-synuclein is a viable and less invasive option for diagnosing PD. study appears in the Parkinson’s Disease Journalpublished by IOS Press, now part of Sage.
Lead researchers Annika Kluge and Eva Schaeffer, both from the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel Campus and Kiel University, Germany, say: “In recent years, it has been shown that alpha-synuclein, a highly pathophysiologically relevant protein that accumulates in nerve cells, can also be detected in various body fluids and tissues of people with PD, for example in the cerebrospinal fluid or in skin tissue.”
In a previous publication, this research team was able to show that alpha-synuclein can also be detected in the blood of PD patients by isolating small vesicles of neuronal cells (neuronal exosomes) from the blood and amplifying the alpha-synuclein they contain using a seed amplification assay (SAA).
Dr. Kluge adds: “With this current work, we aimed to confirm that this blood test can detect alpha-synuclein in a broader group of people with PD and to determine whether the amount of alpha-synuclein measured with SAA changes over the course of the disease.”
The researchers analyzed cross-sectional blood samples from patients with Parkinson’s disease and compared them to samples from age- and sex-matched healthy controls using a SAA blood test. In this study, 79 of the 80 patients with Parkinson’s disease showed a positive concentration of blood-derived alpha-synuclein, while none of the healthy controls showed a positive blood test. This confirms that the blood marker alpha-synuclein is highly sensitive for Parkinson’s disease.
Comparing subgroups of PD patients with different disease durations, longer disease duration was associated with lower alpha-synuclein seeding activity, showing that alpha-synuclein seeding activity changes during the course of the disease. It remains unclear whether and, if so, how alpha-synuclein seeding activity changes during the natural course of the disease.
Dr Schaeffer and Dr Kluge conclude: “There is currently no blood test for PD available in clinical practice. It is of course very important that the good results of our cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses are validated and reproduced in different laboratories. If the decrease in seeding activity in the blood is confirmed, it could influence further studies and our understanding of disease progression. In the long term, it is hoped that this blood test can be used to improve the safety and reliability of PD diagnosis, even in early stages where clinical diagnosis is difficult. Furthermore, the impact on clinical studies must be considered, especially with regard to the potential of targeted antibody-based therapies for PD.”
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