No, you're unlikely to get an early warning of Parkinson's

But a blood test could help unlock a cure

The big news of the week for anyone interested in Parkinson’s is a new way of diagnosing the condition via a simple blood test. Researchers at UCL and a German university identified eight proteins in the brain linked to Parkinson’s and used machine learning to identify people who had the disease or were likely to develop it - you can read more about it here.

This is the latest in a number of new techniques that promise to make diagnosis faster and more accurate - Manchester University, building on the work of Joy Milne, who can smell Parkinson’s, is hoping a simple swab of the back of your neck might provide the answer, while researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL found that eye scans could detect signs of Parkinson’s up to seven years before anyone was likely to visit a neurologist.

And it was a similar claim about the blood test predicting someone would get Parkinson’s seven years before they had any symptoms which grabbed all the headlines. It provoked one big question for all of those interviewed about the story - including me and my Movers and Shakers colleague Gillian Lacey-Solymar. Would we have wanted to know about our Parkinson’s seven years earlier? The answer for me and Gillian was of course not - until there is a cure what benefit is there in knowing when you are fit as a fiddle that one day you will have a neurodegenerative disease?

But this turns out to be academic because it is extremely unlikely that anyone who is fit and well will be offered such a predictive test any time soon. First of all, the test is at an early stage and needs to be validated by more trials which are likely to last for years. Even then, there is no chance that the NHS would want to fund a mass screening programme for Parkinson’s like those for breast or bowel cancer.

The only people likely to be invited to take a test are either those who already have symptoms and need clarity about their diagnosis or those with conditions such as idiopathic REM sleep behaviour disorder (iRBD) thought to be linked to Parkinson’s.

On Twitter (I still refuse to call it X) the comedian David Baddiel echoed what I’m sure are the feelings of many impatient ‘Parkies’ about the news:

“Is it just me, or is the constant present news that medical science has now advanced to the point of being able to forecast years in advance whether or not you will get some terrible disease not really the news I want to hear, compared, say, to the news that they've cured the fucking thing.:

But what he us missing is that the blood test is important, not as a Parkinson’s predictor, but as part of the huge effort underway to understand what is causing the death of dopamine cells in our brains in the years before we notice anything going wrong. Therein lies the answer to finding a cure but that may also need some generous souls with no health problems to volunteer for clinical trials which could deliver them some difficult news about their future.