Biomarkers for the progression of Parkinson disease

The chief outlay for a study of the progression of Parkinson disease (PD) is time, and many of the important scientific returns from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative database lie in the future. Pagano et al.1 have conducted a cross-sectional survey of the de novo PD patient cohort. One of their conclusions is that older patients have greater motor and nonmotor deficits with more widespread striatal dopaminergic lesions on DaTSCAN, implying that longitudinal data should tell us more about the ways that [alpha]-synuclein and other pathologies in PD are governed by age.