Neurology: Disease-associated α-synuclein aggregates as biomarkers for the clinical phase of Parkinson's disease

Protein misfolding is the most obvious feature of all common neurodegenerative diseases, each involving a different, but overlapping, major protein

Figure 1: Cover art of the paper

In recent years, a great deal of effort has been put into identifying specific disease markers and developing diagnostic tools for the early detection of synaptoprotein diseases, many of which have focused on detecting misfolded αSyn aggregates in tissues and biological fluids

Among the different assays established for the detection of αSyn form, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is a simple and rapid technique that allows sensitive and specific quantitative analysis of relevant analytes and facilitates large-scale screening

Encouraging results

Recent studies have shown that seed amplification methods (SAAs) have the ability to detect αSyn disease-associated

The main research question explored in this study is whether combining αSyn SAA and oligomer-specific ELISA provides accurate and robust measurable test readings that reflect disease severity

With this, Nour Majbour et al.

They combined seed amplification assay (SAA) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to provide a quantitative test reading that reflects the clinical severity of PD patients

Oligomer-specific ELISA robustly quantifies SAA end-products from PD or DLB subjects with a high sensitivity and specificity score (100%)

In the discovery cohort, the level of CSF-seeded αSyn oligomer correlated with the severity of clinical symptoms of PD, as measured by UPDRS-motor (r=0.

After 20 hours, the sensitivity of ROC analysis was 91.

The significance of the study lies in the discovery that combining SAA and ELISA testing is a more promising diagnostic tool than SAA alone, providing information