A pencil and paper may be all that is needed to diagnose Parkinson's disease before physical symptoms appear, Australian scientists say.
Biomedical engineers at RMIT have developed a "breakthrough" diagnostic tool that records how someone draws a spiral and then analyses the data in real time.
The software is said to have a 93 per cent accuracy rate, offering hope it could one day be used as a standard screening test to spot the condition in its earliest stages.
"Pushing back the point at which treatment can start is critical because we know that by the time someone starts to experience tremors or rigidity, it may already be too late," said chief investigator Professor Dinesh Kumar.
"We've long known that Parkinson's disease affects the writing and sketching abilities of patients, but efforts to translate that insight into a reliable assessment method have failed - until now," Prof Kumar said.
Because there are no current lab tests, a confirmed diagnosis of Parkinson's often occurs after nerve cells in the brain have already been irreversibly damaged.
An estimated 80,000 Australians are living with Parkinson's disease, making it the second most common neurological disease in Australia after dementia.
It's a disease that can strike the young, with about 30 per cent diagnosed by the age of 50.
Because there are no current lab tests, a person is often diagnosed when many nerves cells in the brain have already suffered irreversible damage.
However this new software may change that, says PhD researcher Poonam Zham who led a small study to test its efficacy.
A study, published in journal Frontiers in Neurology, tested the tool on 62 people diagnosed with Parkinson's disease - of which half had no visible symptoms and half ranged from mildly to severely affected.
The researchers compared the effectiveness of different dexterity tasks - writing a sentence, writing individual letters, writing a sequence of letters and sketching a guided Archimedean spiral - and determined that the spiral was the most reliable and also the easiest for participants to complete.
"With this tool we can tell whether someone has Parkinson's disease and calculate the severity of their condition, with a 93 per cent accuracy rate," said Prof Kumar.
"While we still have more research to do, we're hopeful that in future doctors or nurses could use our technology to regularly screen their patients for Parkinson's, as well as help those living with the disease to better manage their condition."
Share
