Over the years, I’ve talked with dozens of people with Parkinson’s disease (PD).
Male or female, old or young, they tend to have one characteristic in common, even if they don’t all share the same motor or non-motor symptoms. To the person, all share an arduous story about their diagnosis.
There is no specific data on how long it typically takes for a person with PD to gain an meaningful diagnosis, but it is typically years. Years. And every day that goes by, the debilitating effects of this incurable and progressive disease take hold and irreversible. So when a scientist comes up with a new method that might yield a meaningful diagnosis, it’s big news. This month, a young PhD candidate in Israel is hoping she cracked the code.
Suaad Abd-Elhadi at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Medicine was awarded the 2017 Kaye Innovation Award for her invention of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), a lipid diagnostic tool, according to the news source Israel 21c.
The prestigious awards have been granted annually since 1994. Named in honor of Isaac Kaye of England, a prominent industrialist in the pharmaceutical industry, who established the awards, the stipend hopes to “encourage faculty, staff and students of the Hebrew University to develop innovative methods and inventions with good commercial potential, which will benefit the university and society.”
Abd-Elhadi’s innovation hopes to pinpoint specific protein called alpha-synuclein is secreted on the cellular level and can serve as a biomarker for parkinson’s disease.
The protein causes the symptoms of PD that are most characteristic; it’s associated with tissues where Parkinson’s disease can be detected, along with the nervous system routes the disease uses. If the initial results of the research are correct, a blood test will be able to acurately identify the disease.
Although there is no cure for parkinson’s, early detection can provide people with the disease an opportunity to seek treatments that mange symptoms, including cognitive, motor and non-motor side effects.
Diet and exercise have also proven successful to slow the progress of the disease among those who are diagnosed, especially in cases of early-onset PD. More than 10 million people worldwide are living with Parkinson’s disease. Incidence of Parkinson’s increases with age, but an estimated four percent of people with PD are diagnosed before the age of 50, according to Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.
