Blood test spots Parkinson's risk before symptoms

Parkinson's disease begins more than 10 years before patients seek help for symptoms

Researchers in Oxford have developed a blood test to identify people likely to develop Parkinson's disease.

The Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford University said the test could spot early signs of the disease long before symptoms occur.

Parkinson's is known to start more than 10 years before patients seek help for symptoms.

It is hoped a test will allow those suitable for early-stage clinical trials to be identified more quickly.

Parkinson's disease affects seven million people worldwide, and cases are expected to double by 2040.

By the time people are diagnosed, damage to nerve cells - which leads to movement disorder and often dementia - has already occurred.

Reporting in JAMA Neurology, Shijun Yan and colleagues in the Tofaris Lab said changes in a protein called alpha-synuclein could identify people who are likely to develop Parkinson's disease.

In the first study of its kind, the team looked at hundreds of individuals and found those with the highest risk of developing Parkinson's had a two-fold increase in alpha-synuclein levels.

A major bottleneck in conducting clinical trials for disease modification is the identification of patients at the earliest stages of the disease while excluding other diseases with similar symptoms.

Prof George Tofaris, who is supervising the research, said: "A screening test that could be implemented at scale to identify the disease process early is imperative for the eventual instigation of targeted therapies, as is currently done with screening programmes for common types of cancer."

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