Thanks to the latest giant leaps in medicine, it will be possible in the future to diagnose Parkinson’s disease from a saliva swab.
In fact, it seems that the regulators of the anomalous protein of this disease have been revealed with a test that within a few days, through saliva analysis, is able to diagnose it with 99% accuracy.
Parkinson’s disease from saliva tests
We are used to hearing about tampons by now but never related to important diseases such as Parkinson’s. We all know it but until now no one believed that it could be diagnosed through a simple saliva swab.
In fact, according to the latest discoveries, it seems that a saliva swab is enough to understand if we really suffer from this disease and the results, which arrive a few days later, promise a99% accuracy.
The study was published in the Annals of Neurology by researchers from the Sapienza University of Rome, but only researchers from other institutes participated, comparing newly diagnosed patients and so-called de novo patients for a period of two years.
The research examined a group of predominantly male people, since Parkinson’s mostly affects these subjects who were in fact more than twice as many as women.
The average age of the people taken into consideration is 73 years old and in particular we are talking about 80 Parkinson’s patients and 62 of the same gender and age but without a diagnosis.
The healthy subjects were selected and after excluding those with diseases that could alter the result of the swab and those with diseases that included drug-based therapies that could induce some disease-like symptomswe proceeded to sample the saliva of each one.
The patients also underwent a motor and cognitive reassessments.
New markers
The first author of this important and avant-garde study is Giorgio Vivacqua, professor of theCampus Biomedico University of Romewho stated in this regard:
“The hallmark parkinsonian marker is alpha-synuclein, which is already known to doctors, but we also looked for other markers. so we also studied salivary ones of other processes involved such as protein aggregation, inflammation and cell degradation”.
According to the results it appears that the MAP-LC3beta proteins and the cytokine TNFalpha are higher in those affected by the disease, responsible for related problems such as constipation, sleep disorders and depression.
The clinical and laboratory indices were independent of each other and further research will be needed to understand how far the salivary swab can go further to correctly diagnose the Parkinson’s disease and not just point out the possibility.
Certainly the main marker remains oligomeric alpha-synuclein, which can even distinguish who is in the initial stage of the disease by those who don’t have it at all, with 100% sensitivity.
Now we will have to study as much as the new ones saliva markers can influence the main one and therefore arrive at a prognostic meaning never had before.
Although it is only in its infancy, the study lays the groundwork for a groundbreaking new medical discovery about this harmful and debilitating disease.