Plasma IL-6 and IL-17A Correlate with Severity of Motor and Non-Motor Symptoms in Parkinson’s Disease

The nature of the inflammatory response in Parkinson’s disease (PD) remains to be better understood. Here, we used highly sensitive Single Molecule Array (SIMOA) technology to measure the levels of the inflammatory mediators Interleukin 6 (IL-6), Interleukin 17A (IL-17A), Tumour Necrosis Factor α (TNFα) and Transforming Growth Factor β (TGFβ) in plasma from PD patients and age- and gender-matched healthy controls. We report that IL-17A correlates with non-motor symptoms (NMS) scores, while IL-6 positively correlates with motor scores. We found no correlations between cytokines and disease duration suggesting that IL-6 and IL-17A are associated with disease severity rather than disease duration in this cohort, furthermore IL-17A may be involved in the underlying pathophysiology of NMS in PD.