On Jan. 29, 2026, a team led by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and Oslo University Hospital, Norway, announced they succeeded in identifying biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease in its earliest stages, before extensive brain damage has occurred. The study published is published in npj Parkinson’s Disease.

The biological processes leave measurable traces in the blood, but only for a limited period. The discovery thus reveals a window of opportunity that could be crucial for future treatment, but also for early diagnosis via blood tests, which could begin to be tested in healthcare within five years.

Parkinson’s is an endemic disease with over 10 million people affected globally. As the world’s population grows older, this number is expected to more than double by 2050. At present, there is neither an effective cure nor an established screening method for detecting this chronic neurological disorder at an early stage before it has caused significant damage to the brain.

“By the time the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease appear, 50 – 80 per cent of the relevant brain cells are often already damaged or gone. The study is an important step towards facilitating early identification of the disease and counteracting its progression before it has gone this far,” says Danish Anwer, a doctoral student at the Department of Life Sciences at Chalmers and the study’s first author.

In the study, the researchers focused on two processes thought to be involved in the very early phase of the disease, which can last up to 20 years in Parkinson’s patients before motor symptoms are fully developed. One of the processes is the body’s DNA damage repair, which is the cells’ built-in system for detecting and correcting damage. The second is the cells’ stress response, a survival reaction activated by threats, in which cells prioritise repair and protection by pausing normal functions.

The researchers used machine learning and other techniques to discover a pattern of distinct gene activities linked to DNA damage repair and stress response in patients in the early phase of Parkinson’s disease. This pattern was not found in either healthy individuals or diagnosed patients who already had symptoms.

In the next stage, the researchers will try to understand exactly how the mechanisms activated in the early stage of the disease work, and develop tools to make it even easier to detect them. Within five years, the research team believes that blood tests for early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease could begin to be tested in healthcare. In the longer term, it is hoped that the research will also contribute to the development of drugs to prevent or treat the disease.