AJ Vanisree
University of Madras, India
Title: Circulating signatures in patients with Parkinson’disease – a concrete search
Biography
Biography: AJ Vanisree
Abstract
Parkinson’s disease (PD), the second most common neurodegenerative disorder affecting, more severely, the aged population is a complicating disease in terms of diagnosis and management. Many investigations have identified biomarkers for accelerating improved diagnosis and tracking of the disease. However, many of them require sound technical expertise and expensive modes of assessment in addition to the problem of the inadequate/lack of accessibility of the brain tissue of PD patients. In view of such scenario we did investigate biochemical and molecular analyses of blood samples from PD patients and found potential candidates which could be validated as peripheral markers for implication in risk assessment, diagnosis and also in assessing the course of the treatment. Understanding the robust link of oxidative stress and neural cell damage in the neurodegenerative process, we assessed the mRNA expression of reportedly highly vulnerable water channel, aquaporin (AQP4) and Phosphatidyl ethnolamine binding protein (PBP), brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and tropomyosin receptor factor (NTRK2) in the blood samples of PD and non-PD. The study included 140 PD patients and 70 healthy controls. RNA isolation was carried out using blood samples of the subjects recruited in the study and used for qRT-PCR analysis of AQP4, Tyroine hydroxylase as well as PBP. The data were significantly evaluated with SPSS/10 software. Hypothesis testing method was performed and p values of less than 0.05 were considered to indicate statistical significance. The mRNA expressions of AQP4 and TH were found to be reduced whereas that of PBP was found to be elevated when compared with those of healthy control samples. Further, NMR and MS analyses of the lipid content of the samples had surprisingly revealed a new candidate molecules exclusively present in the PD population. The selected PD candidate genes in the study are anticipated to provide valuable resources for developing and understanding of the molecular mechanism associated with PD and for discovering potential diagnostic/therapeutic/pathological markers for PD, as it is a widely accepted fact that peripheral changes could be considered as marker of brain changes in PD patients.