Some people with Parkinson’s disease will test negative with the best test yet, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A type of test known as a seeding assay has been shown to be very good at diagnosing conditions like Parkinson’s disease, caused by a protein that folds incorrectly. Parkinson’s disease expert Ted Dawson at Johns Hopkins predicts these types of assays will become the new gold standard for diagnosis, yet a number of patients may not benefit.

Dawson: In the largest paper done doing the seeding assay in the cerebral spinal fluid there's a subgroup of patients with Parkinson's disease that the assay is negative. There are patients with clinical Parkinson's disease that don't seem to be due to what that is I mean it could be a genetic mutation or something that we don't know yet.   :29

For those who test negative it’s clear that some other mechanism that has yet to be discerned is at work to produce a clinical picture of Parkinson’s, Dawson says, and that has implications for treatment also. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.