opportunity for drug trials to yield clear outcomes and establish whether candidate drugs are effective against disease biology .
Biological disease staging systems help researchers and clinicians characterize early disease and monitor progression , so that treatment regimens can start earlier and can be targeted to specific aspects of disease biology over time . Treatments can then be designed to respond to objective understanding of disease biology rather than subjective observation of clinical symptoms .
Combined with the new biomarker test , other tools developed over the past few decades support a framework sufficient for screening . A vision for this would look like this :
Step 3 People found to have abnormal alpha-synuclein would then receive an imaging test — DaTscan — to assess if their brain is experiencing dopamine loss associated with Parkinson ’ s . When used in combination with testing for the presence of abnormal alpha-synuclein , this scan can help quantify disease progression and stage the disease .
Step 4 Clinicians would monitor individuals who are aSyn- SAA- and DaTscan-positive for earliest PD symptoms that may arise and progress , manifesting as motor symptoms for some and / or cognitive changes for others .
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