Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder. The diagnosis of PD is challenging and currently none of the biochemical tests have proven to help in diagnosis. Serum metallomic analysis may suggest the possibility of diagnosis of PD.
Methodology/results: The metallomic analysis was targeted on 31 elements obtained from 42 healthy controls and 45 drug naive PD patients using ICP-AES and ICP-MS to determine the concentration variations of elements between PD and normal. The targeted metallomic analysis showed the significant variations in 19 elements of patients compared to healthy control (p<0.04). The partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) showed aluminium, copper, iron, manganese and zinc are the key elements, contributes the separation of PD patients from control samples. The correlation coefficient analysis and element-element ratio confirm the imbalance of inter-elements relationship in PD patients' serum. Furthermore, elements linkage map analysis showed aluminium is a key element involved in triggering of phosphorus, which subsequently lead to imbalance of homeostatic in PD serum. The execution of neural network using elements concentrations provides 95% accuracy in detection of disease.
Conclusions/significance: These results suggest that there is a disturbance in the elements homeostasis and inter-elements relationship in PD patients' serum. The analysis of serum elements helps in linking the underlying cellular processes such as oxidative stress, neuronal dysfunction and apoptosis, which are the dominating factors in PD. Also, these results increase the prospect of detection of early PD from serum through neural network algorithm.