AI Blood Test Predicts Parkinson’s Years Before Onset

June 18, 2024 Medicine, Science

The Guardian reports:

A blood test that draws on artificial intelligence can predict who will develop Parkinson’s disease up to seven years before symptoms arise, researchers say.

The test is designed to work on equipment already found in many NHS laboratories and, if validated in a broad population of people, could be made available to the health service within two years.

There are no drugs to protect the brain from Parkinson’s at present, but an accurate predictive test would enable clinics to identify people who stand to benefit most from clinical trials of treatments that aim to slow or halt the disease.

Courthouse News reports:



“The test enables us to diagnose and predict if the subjects will develop Parkinson’s disease or not with a very small amount of blood, ten microliters, just a spot,” said Dr. Michael Bartl, clinical scientist in the Neurology Department at the University Medical Center, Göttingen, Germany.

According to Bartl, one of the barriers to developing effective therapies for the disease is that the current testing methodologies only allow clinical researchers to evaluate new drugs in trials with patients who are already in the advanced stages of neurodegeneration.

“Usually at this stage most of the neurons for cells in the brain are already gone, and there is a theory that a lot of the trials fail because they come too late,” Bartl said.

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