Abstract
Early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) plays a critical role in effective disease management and delayed disease progression. This study reports a technique that could diagnose and differentiate PD from essential tremor (ET) in its earlier stage using a non-motor phenotype. Autonomic dysfunction, an early symptom in PD patients, is caused by -synuclein pathogenesis in the central nervous system and can be diagnosed using skin vasomotor response to cold stimuli. In this study, the investigations were performed using data collected from 20 PD, 20 ET and 20 healthy subjects. Infrared thermography was used for the cold stress test to observe subjects’ hand temperature before and after cold stimuli. The results show that the recovery rate of hand temperature was significantly different between the groups. The data obtained in the cold stress test were verified using Pearson’s cross-correlation technique, which showed that few disease parameters like medication and motor rating score had an impact on the recovery rate of hand temperature in PD subjects. The characteristics of the three groups were compared and classified using the k-means clustering algorithm. The sensitivity and specificity of these techniques were analyzed using an Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analyzer. These results show that this non-invasive technique can be used as an effective tool in the diagnosis and differentiation of PD in its early stage.
Highlights
There are one million people living with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and 60,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, across the world [1]
This study showed that the PD patients had a significantly higher SCOPA-AUT score when compared to healthy subjects, whereas the SCOPA-AUT score was not significant between essential tremor (ET) and healthy subjects
It is evident from the analysis that the hand thermography of a PD subject varies between ET and healthy subjects due to CST
Summary
There are one million people living with PD and 60,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, across the world [1]. The diagnosis of PD in its early stage and instituting suitable treatment will slow the liability of disease progression. Some critical features of the non-motor phase are fatigue, cognitive impairment, depression and anxious mood, improper sleep, autonomic dysfunction, hyposmia, etc. With the onset of the motor phase, patients will start experiencing speech difficulties, drooling, chewing and swallowing difficulty, facial expression change, problems with handwriting, resting tremors (4–6 Hz), imbalanced walking, bradykinesia, freezing of legs while standing and a need for assistance with walking [6,7]. There is a lot of scope in diagnosing the disease early (stage 1) in order to improve the quality of living in PD subjects and this work has been done to achieve the early diagnosis of PD
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