Blood Test for Early Parkinson’s Detection and Treatment

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is currently diagnosed clinically and somewhat late in the illness’s progression. Finding an objective, quantifiable biomarker for this extremely common movement condition is desperately needed. Now, preliminary data suggests that a blood test to identify the alpha-synuclein protein is a practical, less invasive way to identify Parkinson’s disease (PD). Published by IOS Press, which is now a part of Sage, the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease features the paper.

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“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,” state 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.

By separating tiny vesicles from neuronal cells (called neural exosomes) from the blood and amplifying the alpha-synuclein they contained using a seed amplification assay (SAA), this research team was able to demonstrate in a previous publication that alpha-synuclein can also be detected in the blood of PD patients.

According to Dr. Kluge, “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 course of the disease.”

Using a blood-based SAA, researchers examined cross-sectional blood samples from PD patients and contrasted them with those from age- and gender-matched healthy controls. In this investigation, blood-derived alpha-synuclein was positively seeded in 79 out of 80 PD patients, although no blood test result was positive in any of the healthy controls. This attests to the remarkable sensitivity of the alpha-synuclein blood marker for Parkinson’s disease.
Longer illness duration was linked to reduced alpha-synuclein seeding activity when PD patient subgroups with varying disease durations were compared, indicating that alpha-synuclein seeding activity varies with disease progression. The question is whether, and if so, how, alpha-synuclein seeding activity varies as the disease progresses naturally.

Dr. Schaeffer and Dr. Kluge conclude, “There is currently no blood test for PD available in clinical practice. It is of course of great importance that the strong results of our cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses are validated and replicated in different labs. If the decline in seeding activity in blood was confirmed, it may 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 diagnostic security and reliability in PD, even at early stages during which clinical diagnosis is difficult. Moreover, the impact on clinical studies needs to be considered, especially regarding the potential of antibody-based targeted treatments for PD.”

For more information: Association of Misfolded α-Synuclein Derived from Neuronal Exosomes in Blood with Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis and Duration, Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, https://doi.org/10.3233/JPD-230390