Anastassiya Bezhekeneva
When it comes to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, the earlier you can treat it, the better. Not only can this give patients an opportunity to make crucial lifestyle changes that could delay the disease, but it gives clinicians valuable data that can help guide treatment.
These are hard diseases to catch early, though. Most diagnoses happen when the disease has made itself known through clear symptoms like body tremors or speech changes. By that time, it’s a race to simply treat the symptoms and stop them from getting worse—with precious little time to waste.
However, that might soon all change with some new research published Monday in the journal Neurology that found that signs of Parkinson’s disease can be spotted years before diagnosis and before symptoms begin to show by scanning patients’ eyeballs. The technique utilizes an AI model to detect the presence of the neurodegenerative disease in patients on average seven years before clinical diagnosis.