Australian scientists have developed a new blood test that has potential to identify Parkinson’s disease (PD) (early) in people, which is enabling doctors to better treat their patients who have this dreaded disease that leads to disability.
Diagnosing people with PD has been challenging road—for patients, their loved ones, and their healthcare teams (and I’m also guessing, insurance companies). It is a disease of exclusion, which means that doctors have to methodically rule out other possible causes of symptoms that include:
- Shaking and tremors
- Loss of smell
- Difficulty walking or moving, strange gait
- Small handwriting
- Low/soft voice
- Masking of the face
- Difficulty sleeping
- Depression
- Dizziness/fainting
And this is important because these symptoms can be caused by other chronic illnesses and conditions which may include:
- Diabetes
- Multiple sclerosis
- Stroke
- Brain tumor
- Depression
- Stress and anxiety
- Menopause
- Viruses
Not only is it time-consuming, anxiety-producing, and stressful, it’s also expensive! And doctors need to use care when diagnosing their patients because the wrong treatment approach can have unwelcome side effects that may actually make PD worse. If you’d like to read an interesting article about the specifics of the study, click here.
If I’m understanding things correctly, apparently, for years, scientists thought that PD was caused at the cellular level in the mitochondria, that a defect was responsible which produced toxic chemicals (byproducts) in the body. But, instead of seeing defects in the mitochondria, they discovered that the cells were were working WAY harder and faster than they normally do, causing the release of these toxic chemicals. They also learned that people who have PD don’t have damaged mitochondria. So, they deduced that if they could find out why these toxic chemicals were being produced, they could develop proper treatments.
Guessing that this new knowledge could also be used to help doctors more accurately diagnose Parkinson’s, the study’s scientists developed a new diagnostic test. It looks for that hyperactive mitochondria activity they noticed in the clinical trial. And the best part? It’s shockingly accurate! They were able to identify PD in patients because they had crazy active mitochondria! This is exciting news because it means that patients can be diagnosed sooner and hopefully get better symptom management. With any luck, scientists will be able to develop targeted treatments. Who knows? Maybe this test will also be useful in other neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
