Toward Personalized Medicine Approaches for Parkinson Disease Using Digital Technologies

Abstract

Parkinson disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder that afflicts over 10 million people worldwide, resulting in debilitating motor and cognitive impairment. In the United States alone (with approximately 1 million cases), the economic burden for treating and caring for persons with PD exceeds US $50 billion and myriad therapeutic approaches are under development, including both symptomatic- and disease-modifying agents. The challenges presented in addressing PD are compounded by observations that numerous, statistically distinct patient phenotypes present with a wide variety of motor and nonmotor symptomatic profiles, varying responses to current standard-of-care symptom-alleviating medications (L-DOPA and dopaminergic agonists), and different disease trajectories. The existence of these differing phenotypes highlights the opportunities in personalized approaches to symptom management and disease control. The prodromal period of PD can span across several decades, allowing the potential to leverage the unique array of composite symptoms presented to trigger early interventions. This may be especially beneficial as disease progression in PD (alongside Alzheimer disease and Huntington disease) may be influenced by biological processes such as oxidative stress, offering the potential for individual lifestyle factors to be tailored to delay disease onset. In this viewpoint, we offer potential scenarios where emerging diagnostic and monitoring strategies might be tailored to the individual patient under the tenets of P4 medicine (predict, prevent, personalize, and participate). These approaches may be especially relevant as the causative factors and biochemical pathways responsible for the observed neurodegeneration in patients with PD remain areas of fluid debate. The numerous observational patient cohorts established globally offer an excellent opportunity to test and refine approaches to detect, characterize, control, modify the course, and ultimately stop progression of this debilitating disease. Such approaches may also help development of parallel interventive strategies in other diseases such as Alzheimer disease and Huntington disease, which share common traits and etiologies with PD. In this overview, we highlight near-term opportunities to apply P4 medicine principles for patients with PD and introduce the concept of composite orthogonal patient monitoring.