To date Parkinson's disease (PD) is diagnosed clinically and rather late in the course of the disease. There is an urgent need to find an objective, quantifiable biomarker for the diagnosis of this highly prevalent movement disorder. Researchers have now found initial evidence that a blood test to detect the alpha-synuclein protein is a viable, less invasive option to diagnose PD.
The study appears in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease , published by IOS Press, now part of Sage. Lead investigators Annika Kluge, MD, and Eva Schaeffer, MD, both of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein, Campus Kiel and Kiel University, Kiel, Germany, say, "In recent years, it has been shown that the pathophysiological highly relevant protein alpha-synuclein, which accumulates in nerve cells, can also be detected in different body fluids and tissues of individuals 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 from 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 larger group of individuals with PD and elucidate whether the amount of alpha-synuclein measured with the SAA changes during the c.