Abstract

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes impaired motor control, tremors, muscle rigidness, and bradykinesia. While the cause of PD is unknown, it has been found that PD patients have decreased levels of dopamine due to aggregation of alpha-synuclein (a-Syn) protein in dopaminergic neurons. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, regulatory molecules that bind to complementary messenger RNA to inhibit or decrease protein expression. It is observed that downregulation of miRNA34b/c leads to an increase of a-Syn. Here, we used quantitative real-time PCR to quantify expression of miRNA34b/c in fast and slow progression PD patients at time of diagnosis. Comparison of fast and slow progression PD patients showed fast progression patients have significantly lower expression of miRNA34b (p-value= 0.0025) and miRNA34c (p-value=0.0156), meaning that fast progression PD may have higher a-Syn at time of diagnosis. Thus, miRNA34b/c may serve as disease progression biomarkers for PD.