Movement disorders: New approach: Neuromelanin approach tracks melanin deposition in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder with progressive and disabling motor and non-motor symptoms for which there are no effective disease-modifying treatments

Neuromelanin (NM)-sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a new technology that addresses the need for reliable early imaging markers of PD and tracks disease progression

However, the NM-MRI results reported to date have important limitations due to the single-center setting, lack of consensus and standardization of analysis protocols, and unknown generalizability in multi-scanning platform and multi-protocol settings

Importantly, there are few longitudinal studies of PD

Overall, NMMRI shows great promise as a diagnostic and sequential progression marker in PD clinical trials, but multisite evidence and standardized analytical tools are lacking

Hereby, Xing Yue et al.

They found that: All NM metrics performed well in distinguishing patients from controls, with ROC showing ventral NM contrast with 85% accuracy and volume with 83%

Good generality (79% accuracy) using prior volume truncation

Serial MRI showed that NM loss was accelerated in patients compared with controls

Depigmentation of the ventral substantia nigra was more severe on the most affected side, and changes in substantia nigra NM volume correlated with changes in motor severity

The significance of this study lies in the findings that: NM-MRI provides clinically useful diagnostic information in early PD , including protocol, platform, and location