Validating Diagnostic and Screening Procedures for Pre-Motor Parkinson's Disease

The goal of this 24-month proposal is to establish the critical infrastructure for the initiation of a five year prospective follow-up study to identify those at risk for developing PD or a related Lewy body disorder in three study populations. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop low-cost non-invasive screening methods to detect pre-motor Parkinson s disease (PD) that can be implemented population-wide. Our hypothesis is that cardiac autonomic dysfunction assessed as heart rate variability (HRV) using a standard EKG, in combination with hyposmia and other simple screening tests, will be highly predictive of abnormalities in DAT imaging and ultimately predict the emergence of full-blown PD or a related Lewy body disorder.