Eye movements as key to improved early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease

Marburg medicine and physics combine their expertise in innovative eye-tracking study.

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease (PD) are on the rise worldwide. In the clinic, the phenotypic similarities between early-stage PD and diseases such as early-stage multiple system atrophy (MSA) complicate treatment strategies. Accurate differentiation of these diseases is critical to the development of treatments that can delay progression from the prodromal stage through early symptomatic stages to full-blown disease. Video-based eye tracking allows the simultaneous measurement of eye movements, pupil size and blinking. The data obtained is important in differentiating Parkinson's disease from other related brain disorders and in assessing the severity of impairment. In a recent study by the Neurophysics Group in collaboration with the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Giessen-Marburg (UKGM), the eye movement behavior of people with Parkinson's disease (PD), MSA and people at risk of developing PD, such as those with isolated rapid eye movement sleep disorder (iRBD), was compared with that of healthy controls. The results showed that PD and MSA patients had irregular eye movements and pupil responses. iRBD patients at high risk of developing PD or MSA had similar changes in pupil size to PD patients, suggesting that pupil changes may serve as an early indicator of patients at risk of developing PD.

The paper was published in: Journal of Parkinson’s Disease

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