Risk Factors and Outcome Predicating Biomarker of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, are major public health issues in the current ageing society. Before the onset of cardinal symptoms, the degenerative process has been progressed for years to decades in advance. Failure of identifying highly disease-correlated risk factors or biomarkers delay the initiation of neuroprotective treatment. Lack of reliable outcome predicting biomarkers undermines the developing of disease modified approach as well. Recently, evidence from large cohort and healthcare database found certain significant risk factors and biomarkers before the onset of disease, such as mild cognitive impairment for Alzheimer’s disease and rapid eye movement sleep disorder for Parkinson’s disease. In addition, vascular lesions are known to fasten the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, while diabetes is associated with rapid deterioration of Parkinson’s disease. However, this knowledge does not either benefit the disease and outcome prediction robustly or help the early initiation of neuroprotective treatment in the clinical trials. This Research Topic welcomes research articles about identifying novel risk factors and outcome predicting biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases, which are not limited to Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, but also include dementia with Lewy body, frontotemporal dementia, multiple system atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The research can be conducted in large-scaled healthcare research database, population-based cohort or hospital/community-based cohort or clinical trials. Biomarkers such as clinical symptoms or proteins, micro RNA or biochemistry profile from either cerebrospinal fluid, blood or urine are all welcome.