Monday, 10 September 2012

Biosignatures for Parkinson's disease and atypical parkinsonian disorders patients


PLoS One. 2012;7(8):e43595. Epub 2012 Aug 27.
Potashkin JA, Santiago JA, Ravina BM, Watts A, Leontovich AA.

Source

The Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology Department, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, The Chicago Medical School, North Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.

Abstract

Diagnosis of Parkinson' disease (PD) carries a high misdiagnosis rate due to failure to recognize atypical parkinsonian disorders (APD). Usually by the time of diagnosis greater than 60% of the neurons in the substantia nigra are dead. Therefore, early detection would be beneficial so that therapeutic intervention may be initiated early in the disease process. We used splice variant-specific microarrays to identify mRNAs whose expression is altered in peripheral blood of early-stage PD patients compared to healthy and neurodegenerative disease controls. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction assays were used to validate splice variant transcripts in independent sample sets. Here we report a PD signature used to classify blinded samples with 90% sensitivity and 94% specificity and an APD signature that resulted in a diagnosis with 95% sensitivity and 94% specificity. This study provides the first discriminant functions with coherent diagnostic signatures for PD and APD. Analysis of the PD biomarkers identified a regulatory network with nodes centered on the transcription factors HNF4A and TNF, which have been implicated in insulin regulation.

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