Functional Neurology: Brain Health Biomarkers

Biomarkers are molecules that can help diagnose a health issue. These have become important for verifying investigations, choosing the best remedies, and monitoring disease progression. One exception, however, includes biomarkers for neurological diseases. Neurological biomarkers are found in the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) or, in undetectable amounts, in the blood vessels. The human brain is closely guarded by the blood-brain barrier which protects it from damaging compounds circulating throughout the blood vessels. The blood-brain barrier has made it inaccessible to use these biomarkers.

Biomarkers may be analyzed using the CSF but this also needs an invasive lumbar puncture process. Biomarker signatures, or recent improvements in discovery, in addition to the ability of clusters of biomarkers, are currently helping to make neurological disorders more treatable and more reachable. Treating and preventing neurological disorders, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, autism, and major depressive disorder, is very likely to become less difficult to diagnose with the recent arrival of neurological biomarkers found in the blood. 

Biomarker for Brain Health Issues

Biomarker signatures, found with panels of high-quality antibodies, are yet another safe and effective tool for evaluating neurological disorders and diseases. Assistant professor of neurology and immunobiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine at Tucson, Kristian Doyle, utilizes biomarkers to examine how the immune system deals with dead brain tissue. The system eliminates brain tissue with a procedure called liquefactive necrosis following a stroke but the pathophysiology of the procedure is unknown. This information is essential because liquefactive necrosis may be neurotoxic.

"We utilize multiplex immunoassays to describe inflammation within chronic stroke infarcts in the point of liquefactive necrosis, and to describe changes by ordinary stroke comorbidities," says Doyle. Because over 10 million individuals survive a stroke every year, Doyle expects that biomarkers may help them monitor the development of liquefactive necrosis and start to tailor remedies that mitigate the secondary harm due to this procedure," he states. Another connection between inflammation and neurotoxicity is analyzed by Alysson Muotri, professor of molecular and cellular medicine and director of the Stem Cell Program at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. The Muotri laboratory uses induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from individuals with schizophrenia and autism to search for biomarkers of those ailments.

Muotri's laboratory started analyzing the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) as a biomarker because evidence indicates that chronic exposure to elevated cytokines might be neurotoxic together with elevated levels associated with depression, autism, and schizophrenia. "The gap of one of the many brain disorders could function as cytokines act on particular types or subtypes of nerves, or within a particular brain area," states Muotri. His laboratory differentiates iPSCs to cells, which they suspect might be releasing cytokines from patients. Also, because IL-6 can also be involved in immune-inflammatory pathways, Muotri supposes a connection between autism and in utero exposure to infection, such as the Zika virus.

"Our forecast is that the inflammation caused by Zika vulnerability is sufficient to make a neurotoxic environment which could rewire how the human brain is shaped," he states. "We see that in mice, therefore, we believe some Zika-exposed children are going to develop autism or have intellectual disabilities" Larger biomarker signatures are available with technologies from CDI Laboratories, which provides microarrays of practical human proteins, including over 20,000 to a single variety, to check the antibodies within human liquid biopsy samples, including blood, serum, plasma, CSF, or tissue lysates. The consequent "autoantibody profile" is a helpful tool for study and for diagnoses or prognoses of individuals.

"We have worked in the area of biomarker discovery for various neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis, neuropsychiatric lupus, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease," states George Dorfman, director of business development in CDI Laboratories, a spin-off firm located in Baltimore, Maryland, and Mayaguez, Puerto Rico which was created from research in the High Throughput Biology Center at Johns Hopkins University. CDI's stage is particularly beneficial in building panels for biomarker discovery because researchers can start by utilizing patient samples or banked trials to evaluate resistant profiles of cohorts that reveal specific symptoms or no indications in the event of control trials.

"This provides us with an inherent candidate biomarker panel that offers advice on the following clinical outcome or curative efficacy, which is confirmed to yield the last panel, then interpreted into the state an ELISA-based kit or any other immunodiagnostic format at the clinical setting," says Dorfman. "In the event of multiple sclerosis, as a patient grows through measures of this disease, their entire body creates novel antibodies or greater present antibody titers against specific proteins, such as myelination proteins. Our panels may discover these, to provide a notion about exactly what patients' disease development might seem like, and supply a signature which may be interpreted into another evaluation or an FDA-approved diagnostic" CDI's technologies have also been utilized to create an autoantibody profile for neuropsychiatric lupus, a beneficial diagnostic tool to ultimately help diagnose a neurological disorder that typically lacks obvious clinical signs. 

Understanding Biomarkers for Brain Health

The amount and types of biomarkers, as well as the quantity of information which researchers have to arrange, can help provide better remedies and prevention methods and techniques. "It ought to be no surprise that researchers spend around 80 percent of the time handling and not assessing statistics," states Scott Marshall, managing director of translational informatics and diagnostic sciences in Precision for Medicine in Frederick, Maryland. The biomarker data management system, PATH, was made to incorporate any sort of biomarker information for further neurological disease diagnosis.

"The true power of biomarkers comes if you connect this data to clinical information," states Marshall. Their biomarker information management system supports translational research and biomarker-guided medicine development and puts no limitation on the number of biomarkers that may be tracked. "It can manage multiple biomarker technologies concurrently, such as complicated flow cytometry, next-generation sequencing, immuno-sequencing, epigenetic profiling, and other varieties of assays measuring biological variant too," states Marshall. Their kind of "translational informatics" instrument is much more efficient than generating reams of information" with no strategy to acquire actionable insights out of these."

Research teams utilize Precision to Medicine's platform for neuro-related programs that vary from illness pathogenesis to creating complicated signatures that are predictive of treatment response. By way of instance, the system was utilized in a research study including the evaluation of transcriptomic and genomic data in the treatment of major depressive disorder. The outcome is a genomically defined subset of individuals utilizing a probability of improvement. "This type of signature can now be evaluated by means of an assay, which may subsequently be developed to accompany diagnostic or free diagnostic to successfully target the correct individual group," states Marshall. Biomarker data management systems become more fundamental as distinct kinds of biomarkers are examined collectively, ultimately including proteins and miRNAs.

Combining kinds of biomarkers will very likely boost their usefulness. "Diagnostics is becoming increasingly more important as we know that the interplay between microRNAs, proteins, DNA, and messenger RNA is necessary," states Pregibon. Clinical decision-making may profit particularly in which the human brain has been blocked by the blood-brain barrier until lately. "The chance to leverage biomarker-driven targeted treatments means that the sufferers that are more inclined to react to treatments are getting them quicker," states Marshall. "For researchers, that's the energy of biomarkers." 

The recent ability to be able to detect neurological biomarkers in the blood, despite the blood-brain barries, is largely due in part to new technological advances in diagnosis and detection. Several of these technologies can ultimately increase sensitivity, however, increased sensitivity can help improve earlier detection or diagnosis of biomarkers for neurological diseases and disorders. Researchers and healthcare professionals currently believe that the presence of these biomarkers may be present earlier than we currently understand, which can help improve health issue diagnosis and treatment. - Dr. Alex Jimenez D.C., C.C.S.T. Insight

Biomarkers are molecules that can help diagnose a health issue. These have become important for verifying investigations, choosing the best remedies, and monitoring disease progression. One exception, however, includes biomarkers for neurological diseases. Neurological biomarkers are found in the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) or, in undetectable amounts, in the blood vessels. The human brain is closely guarded by the blood-brain barrier which protects it from damaging compounds circulating throughout the blood vessels. The blood-brain barrier has made it inaccessible to use these biomarkers.

Biomarkers may be analyzed using the CSF but this also needs an invasive lumbar puncture process. Biomarker signatures, or recent improvements in discovery, in addition to the ability of clusters of biomarkers, are currently helping to make neurological disorders more treatable and more reachable. Treating and preventing neurological disorders, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, autism, and major depressive disorder, is very likely to become less difficult to diagnose with the recent arrival of neurological biomarkers found in the blood. 

The scope of our information is limited to chiropractic, musculoskeletal, and nervous health issues or functional medicine articles, topics, and discussions. We use functional health protocols to treat injuries or disorders of the musculoskeletal system. Our office has made a reasonable attempt to provide supportive citations and has identified the relevant research study or studies supporting our posts. We also make copies of supporting research studies available to the board and or the public upon request. To further discuss the subject matter above, please feel free to ask Dr. Alex Jimenez or contact us.

Curated by Dr. Alex Jimenez 

References:

• Smith, Caitlin. “Biomarkers on the Brain: Putting Biomarkers Together for a Better Understanding of the Nervous System.” Science, 15 Mar. 2018, www.sciencemag.org/features/2017/12/biomarkers-brain-putting-biomarkers-together-better-understanding-nervous-system.