Researchers at University College London and Moorfields Eye Hospital looked for a cheaper, earlier signal in the retina, the one part of the central nervous system that a routine eye scan can see directly.
The team examined retinal scans from more than 50,000 UK Biobank volunteers who had no Parkinson's diagnosis at the time. Over the following years, 53 of them developed the disease, and their scans had already shown thinner layers of retinal nerve cells, years before diagnosis.
The thinning involved two retinal layers tied to neuron health, and the effect held up after adjusting for age, smoking and other eye disease. It is not a diagnostic test; the lead researcher cautioned that predicting Parkinson's in a single person is still years away. A five-minute scan already used in routine eye exams may eventually flag risk long before symptoms appear.
Read the original study
Wagner et al., Neurology, 2023 · doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000207727
A window into the brain, through the eye.
Source
- Wagner, S. K., Romero-Bascones, D., Cortina-Borja, M., Williamson, D. J., Struyven, R. R., Zhou, Y., Patel, S., Weil, R. S., Antoniades, C. A., Topol, E. J., Korot, E., Foster, P. J., Balaskas, K., Ayala, U., Barrenechea, M., Gabilondo, I., Schapira, A. H. V., Khawaja, A. P., Patel, P. J., . . . for UK Biobank Eye & Vision Consortium (2023). Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography Features Associated With Incident and Prevalent Parkinson Disease. Neurology, 101(16), e1581–e1593. https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000207727