WASHINGTON, DC—A skin test may provide new insight into Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, according to a study presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 67th Annual Meeting. The study showed that skin biopsies can be used to detect elevated levels of abnormal proteins found in the two diseases.
“Until now, pathological confirmation was not possible without a brain biopsy, so these diseases often go unrecognized until after the disease has progressed,” said study author Idelfonso Rodríguez-Leyva, MD, Professor of Neurology and Neurophysiology at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí in Mexico. “We hypothesized that since skin has the same origin as brain tissue while in the embryo that they might also show the same abnormal proteins. This new test offers a potential biomarker that may allow doctors to identify and diagnose these diseases earlier on.”
For their study, Dr. Rodríguez-Leyva and colleagues took skin biopsies from the retro-auricular area of 20 people with Alzheimer’s disease, 16 with Parkinson’s disease, and 17 with dementia caused by other conditions and compared them with those of 12 age-matched healthy controls. The researchers tested these skin samples to see if specific types of altered proteins were found—ones that indicate that a person has Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease.
As compared with healthy controls and patients with dementia caused by other conditions, patients with Alzheimer’s disease and patients with Parkinson’s disease had seven times higher levels of phosphorylated tau. Patients with Parkinson’s disease also had an eight times higher level of alpha-synuclein than the healthy control group.
“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. This also means tissue will be much more readily available for scientists to study,” said Dr. Rodriguez-Leyva. “This procedure could be used to study not only Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, but also other neurodegenerative diseases.”