The research carried out by Margalida Puigròs and Ramon Trullás' team, in collaboration with Drs. Iranzo and Tolosa from the Barcelona Clinical Hospital, has made it possible to discover that the presence of mutations in mitochondrial DNA precedes the manifestation of Parkinson's disease by several years. Patients with a sleep behavior disorder, known by the acronym RBD, develop either Parkinson's or Lewy body dementia after years. The study of cerebrospinal fluid samples from patients with RBD sleep disorder, as it constitutes a very early stage of Parkinson's or Lewy dementia, provides a unique opportunity to identify the initial causes of neurodegeneration. We observed that in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients obtained when they were diagnosed with RBD, there was more circulating mitochondrial DNA with mutations than in the cerebrospinal fluid of the control group. But the most relevant finding is that the amount of DNA with mutations is related to the time it will take for patients with sleep behavior disorder to manifest the clinical symptoms of Parkinson's disease. That is, the more mitochondrial DNA with mutations, the sooner the disease will appear. These results suggest that mitochondrial DNA dysfunction is a pathological molecular mechanism that precedes the motor and cognitive clinical manifestation of Parkinson's disease, which will help develop new treatments.
