By Elizabeth Grover
Recently the Parkinson’s community has been buzzing with news of a research breakthrough. It was announced in the Michael J. Fox Foundation newsletter of Spring/Summer 2023 that a new tool (called the alpha-synuclein seeding amplification assay) has been discovered that “can detect pathology in spinal fluid not only of people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but also . . . [of those] at a high risk for developing it.” It does this by detecting the presence of an abnormal kind of the protein alpha-synuclein, a protein that, in the brains of people diagnosed with PD, appears to aggregate and clump together. The Fox newsletter also says that alpha-synuclein “can start to misfold and clump, damaging neurons and causing Parkinson’s disease to develop.”
Although it is useful to have a tool to detect this clumping (previously only detectable post-mortem), Cincinnati’s own Dr. Alberto Espay, a movement disorder specialist at the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute, disagrees with the statement that the clumping causes Parkinson’s; the concentration of alpha-synuclein clumps correlates with PD, but that does not demonstrate causation. When asked to comment, Dr. Espay explained that “alpha-synuclein is a normal protein, which is all over the brain and, in fact, in most parts of the body. Under any of a large range of 'injuries' to the brain, the normal protein, which is in a liquid state, is forced to undergo a transformation to a solid state, called Lewy pathology.” This is a protective strategy, but it leaves the protein in a compact but inactive form too stable to be toxic. Some researchers think that alpha-synuclein turns into a toxin once transformed into Lewy pathology, but Dr. Espay says this is not true. The new test cannot quantify how much of the alpha-synuclein has become solid or how much liquid is left. So Dr. Espay sees it as less useful than it would appear. He says that “it does not correlate with any clinical features or serve for prognosis or monitoring of therapies.” Dr. Espay is a pioneer in this field, so stay tuned for more news as his research continues.
For information about Dr. Espay‘s research or to find out about enrolling in his Cincinnati Cohort Biomarker study, you can contact Dawn Skirpan at 513-558-4569 or Dawn.Skirpan@uc.edu. The CCBP website is a good source of information on what the study entails and, importantly, why it is being done.