For diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, it seems like symptoms are a function of what’s going on deep down inside of whoever is afflicted – a reflection of something happening at the core. But what if detection could be right in front of our faces, just on the surface of a patient’s skin?
Dr. Ildefonso Rodriguez-Leyva and colleagues from the University of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, believe examining skin tissue could be uncover hidden brain disorders.
This early-stage work has indicated that abnormal proteins that accumulate in the brain with these disorders are also found on the skin, which with advanced tests could contribute to early diagnosis to prevent loss of brain tissue before irreversible damage has taken place.
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In a developing embryo, skin and brain tissue have the same origin, so the researchers believe it could indicate disorders that occur in the mind later in life.
As BBC reported:
Post-mortem studies of people with Parkinson’s also reveal that the same protein deposits which occur in the brain with this condition also accumulate in the skin.
To test if the same was true in life as after death, the researchers recruited 65 volunteers – 12 who were healthy controls and the remaining 53 who had either Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia. They took a small skin biopsy from behind the ear of each volunteer to test in their laboratory for any telltale signs of disease.
Specifically, they looked for the presence of two proteins – tau and alpha-synuclein. The 20 people with Alzheimer’s and the 16 with Parkinson’s had raised levels of both these proteins in their skin compared to the healthy controls and the patients with other types of dementia. The people with Parkinson’s also had higher levels of alpha-synuclein protein.
“More research is needed to confirm these results, but the findings are exciting because we could potentially begin to use skin biopsies from living patients to study and learn more about these diseases,” said Dr Rodriguez-Leyva, who will soon present his findings to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. “This new test offers a potential biomarker that may allow doctors to identify and diagnose these diseases earlier on.”
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[Photo from Flickr user Thami César]
