CHANGES OF BLOOD PACAP LEVEL IN PATIENTS WITH PARKINSON’S DISEASE
01/29/2020
Daniel Pham1, Balazs Daniel Fulop1, Beata Polgar2, Zalan Szanto3, Adel Jungling1, Norbert Kovacs4, Istvan Balas5, Endre Pal4, Tunde Toth1, Balazs Fazekas1, Robert Herczeg6, Attila Gyenesei6, Dora Reglodi1, Andrea Tamas1
1 Department of Anatomy, MTA-PTE PACAP Research Team, Centre for Neuroscience, 2Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, 3Department of Surgery, 4Department of Neurology, 5Department of Neurosurgery, 6Szentagothai Research Center, Medical School, University of Pecs, Pecs, Hungary
In the last few years, numerous studies examined changes of PACAP level in human samples to show alterations in various physiological and pathological conditions. There were several studies in the field of neurology as well. Significantly increased plasma PACAP concentrations were present after acute spontaneous basal ganglia hemorrhage, reduced levels in Alzheimer\’s disease patients in several brain areas and in the cerebrospinal fluid. We found correlation between mortality and PACAP levels in severe traumatic brain injury. Our aim was to examine the PACAP in blood samples of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), (n=107, control=39). We measured plasma PACAP38 level of PD patients and searched for correlations with clinical properties such as gender, age, stage and subtype of disease, type of treatment and specified scores for PD. Sandwich-type ELISA (Mybiosource) was used to measure the PACAP38 level of plasma samples. We showed significantly decreased PACAP38 levels in PD patients over 50 years and in Hoehn-Yahr scale stage 3 but elevated PACAP38 levels was found after deep brain stimulation. We didn’t find significant correlations between plasma PACAP38 levels and MDS-UPDRS or the type of pharmacological treatment. Our results are similar to earlier experiments where elevated PACAP38 levels were found after basal ganglia or subarachnoid hemorrhage, traumatic brain injury, in migraine and post-traumatic stress disorder. The neuroprotective and cytoprotective effects of PACAP are well known therefore it suggests the possibility of using PACAP as a biomarker to monitor the course of the disease and foretell the prognosis of this neurodegenerative disorder.