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A Key to Detecting Brain Disease Earlier Than Ever
Treatment of Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, ALS, and other brain diseases depends on reliable detection—especially in those who don’t even know they’re at risk. An innovative scratch-and-sniff test can help.
As for the diagnosis itself, which for most people comes as a bolt from the blue, it has always been frustratingly subjective and essentially based on a physician’s opinion following a brief once-over in the doctor’s office—not very useful for medical care provision, let alone biomedical drug development. The search for the biomarker required finding and studying “needles in a haystack”: people without any traditional symptoms of PD and unwittingly living with increased risk for the disease. But now we can report that the test accurately diagnosed disease in 99 percent of people with poor smell and so-called sporadic Parkinson’s (in other words, those with no genetic mutation).
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