The development of reliable and validated biomarkers for heterogeneous PD progression is a critical unmet need. Validated PD progression markers are essential to accelerate research into PD pathogenesis, and the development of disease-modifying therapeutics (DMT) and would dramatically improve patient care. There are several important prerequisites for the development of valid biochemical progression biomarkers: the establishment of standardized protocols for the acquisition, transfer and analysis of biospecimens; the optimization and verification of bioassays; a sufficient longitudinal follow-up period to track heterogeneous progression; and the recruitment of drug-naïve patients at baseline. PPMI is a five-year observational, international, longitudinal study that aimed to identify biomarkers of PD progression that involve the collaborative effort of PD researchers with expertise in biomarker development, the clinical study of PD, bioinformatics, statistics and data management [
11]. Analogous to the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), the PPMI is a public-private partnership, sponsored by the Michael J Fox Foundation with industry partnership. The overall objective of the PPMI study was to identify the clinical, imaging, and biologic markers of PD progression for use in clinical trials of DMT. Approximately 400 drug-naïve PD patients at the early stage, and 200 age-matched HC were planned to be enrolled from 24 clinical sites in the United States, Europe and Australia (
Figure 2). The number of subjects was calculated with the power to detect a difference in prevalence of 13% (for a dichotomous endpoint) and a standardized mean difference of 0.24 (for a continuous end-point). All PD patients were at the early stage (diagnosis within 2 years and H&Y stage < 2) and untreated with PD medication, as described in detail elsewhere [
11] and on the PPMI website (
http://www.ppmi-info.org/study-design/). The longitudinal collection of biospecimens, including blood, CSF and urine, is an essential component to discovering biological markers that are able to track disease progression. In particular, the collection, processing, aliquoting and storage of CSF were remarkably standardized in the ADNI study. This review discusses the baseline CSF biomarkers (Aβ
1-42, t-tau, p-tau, and α-syn) data of the PPMI cohort.
The partial baseline CSF results (
n = 102; PD = 63, HC = 39) were published in 2013 [
17]. The initial data showed several interesting findings; the lower levels of CSF Aβ
1-42 and p-tau were significantly associated with the PIGD phenotype in multiple logistic regression analysis with adjustment for confounders; the level of α-syn was significantly correlated with the level of t-tau and p-tau, and the levels of α-syn and t-tau were associated with motor severity. A recent analysis of the full baseline dataset showed consistent results (
n = 660; PD = 412, HC = 189, subjects without evidence of dopamine deficit = 59), but some results could not replicate the pilot findings [
10]. For example, the level of CSF Aβ
1-42 or p-tau was not associated with motor phenotype, but the CSF α-syn level in PD patients with the non-TD phenotype was significantly lower than PD patients with the TD phenotype. In addition, there were no CSF biomarkers that were significantly associated with motor severity when multivariate regression analysis with the adjustment of confounding factors was applied, although a low level of p-tau was marginally associated with disease severity. However, the strong correlation between the level of α-syn and t-tau or p-tau in both PD and HC was replicable. Consistent with the pilot study, the levels of CSF α-syn, t-tau, and p-tau, but not Aβ
1-42, were significantly lower in PD compared to HC, while the diagnostic utility of each biomarker was limited due to a large overlap. The lower level of CSF α-syn in PD relative to HC implicates the accumulation of α-syn in the brain of PD patients, analogous to the finding of lower levels of CSF Aβ
1-42 in AD patients compared to HC. The mechanism of a reduction in tau proteins in PD compared with HC is unclear; however, a possible interpretation is that the interaction between tau proteins and α-syn may limit the release of tau proteins into CSF. In connection with this, previous studies using
in vitro [
49], animal models [
49-
51] or postmortem brains of PD [
52,
53] reported that the α-syn pathology in the brain is accompanied by increased levels of hyperphosphorylated tau proteins and tau-positive tangles, and α-syn positive Lewy bodies may co-localize in the same neuron [
54]. The genome-wide association study also supported this hypothesis that
MAPT and
SNCA, which encode tau and α-syn, respectively, showed a genetic association with PD [
55]. Therefore, the extent of the direct or indirect interaction between tau phosphorylation and α-syn accumulation or the pattern of topological distribution of these pathogenic proteins may contribute to the heterogeneous progression of PD. However, the mechanisms that regulate the interaction of α-syn with tau are unclear. Although future long-term longitudinal observations in the PPMI cohort will be required to test the predictive performance of the CSF biomarkers, the baseline data in this large cohort suggest that CSF biomarkers in early PD patients already reflect disease heterogeneity and may have predictive value for disease progression. Our findings of the association of CSF biomarkers with cognitive function in the PPMI cohort was not consistent with other studies [
26,
35,
37,
56-
60]. For example, the association of a higher CSF α-syn level with worsening cognitive decline was observed in the Deprenyl and tocopherol antioxidative therapy of parkinsonism study [
56,
57]. In contrast, the lower CSF α-syn level was associated with more severe neuropsychological function, including semantic fluency, visuospatial cognition and executive functioning in the PPMI cohort, which indicated that α-syn pathology contributes to early cognitive impairment in PD. In addition, multivariate regression analysis of the PPMI baseline data did not fully reproduce the previous findings that the lower level of CSF Aβ
1-42 was associated with cognitive impairment in PD [
26,
35,
59,
60]. The lower level of Aβ
1-42 was significantly associated with processing speed/attention assessed by the Symbol Digit Modality Test (SDMT) but not with other cognitive functions, including the global cognitive function test and Montreal Cognitive Assessment, in the PPMI cohort. Instead, when the clinical variables of the group with the highest quintile levels of CSF biomarkers were compared with those of the group with the lowest quintile levels, the CSF Aβ
1-42 level showed significant associations with semantic fluency and SDMT score, and the t-tau/Aβ
1-42 ratio showed significant associations with memory (total recall and delayed recall measured by Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-Revised score), semantic fluency, SDMT and Wechsler Memory ScaleIII Letter-Number Sequencing score. It should be noted that the PPMI cohort included patients with very early stage and drug-naïve disease at baseline; therefore, whether CSF biomarkers in early PD are associated with the risk of future cognitive decline and PDD should be determined in longitudinal analyses. A recent study that observed a group of PPMI PD patients (
n = 341) for 2 years found a significant association of lower baseline CSF Aβ
1-42 level with higher odds of cognitive impairment [
61], even though the baseline CSF biomarker data showed a slight association of CSF Aβ
1-42 with cognitive dysfunction in multivariate analysis. The discrepancy among studies in the association of CSF biomarkers with clinical variables may be due to several demographic, biological and analytical factors, including but not limited to the different ages among cohorts, the contamination of blood in CSF, the mixed pathology or disease stage of studied patients, and different immunoassay platforms [
62]. Therefore, we should carefully interpret the results for the association of CSF biomarkers with clinical variables.