Cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers of neuropathologically diagnosed Parkinson's disease subjects

Objectives: Parkinson's disease (PD) afflicts approximately 1-2% of the population over 50 years of age. No cures or effective modifying treatments exist and clinical diagnosis is currently confounded by a lack of definitive biomarkers. We sought to discover potential biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of neuropathologically confirmed PD cases. Methods: We compared postmortem ventricular CSF (V-CSF) from PD and normal control (NC) subjects using two-dimensional difference gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE). Spots exhibiting a 1.5-fold or greater difference in volume between PD patients and controls were excised from the two-dimensional gels, subjected to tryptic digestion and identification of peptides assigned using mass spectrometric/data bank correlation methods. Results: Employing this strategy six molecules: fibrinogen, transthyretin, apolipoprotein E, clusterin, apolipoprotein A-1, and glutathione-S-transferase-Pi, were found to be different between PD and NC populations. Discussion: These molecules have been implicated in PD pathogenesis. Combining biomarker data from multiple laboratories may create a consensus panel of proteins that may serve as a diagnostic tool for this neurodegenerative disorder.