A quick cry could one day save your life.
Brazilian researchers have developed a tiny sensor that can detect early signs of Parkinson’s disease in human tears — a method they say is faster, cheaper and far less invasive than the blood tests currently used to measure dopamine levels.
Dopamine tends to drop in Parkinson’s patients a full decade before physical symptoms like tremors appear, making early detection critical, said Mark Frasier, chief scientist at the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
The tear sensor, which delivers results in about three minutes, could flag that decline years before a patient knows anything is wrong.
“This technology of measuring dopamine and tears could be really valuable, early, and even before symptoms developed to identify someone that has lower dopamine, that may be at risk for developing the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,” Frasier said.
Lead researcher Lucas Gonçalves and his supervisor Neftalí Carreño of Federal University of Pelotas spent five years developing the sensor.
Doctors already track dopamine levels to gauge Parkinson’s risk, but the standard method is a blood draw, which is expensive and has to be repeated, they said. Their sensor needs only a tear.
“Blood tests are very expensive, very invasive, and always you need to do one more time,” Gonçalves told The Post. “In this case, we can take a tear, put in the sensor and do it quickly, three minutes maybe, for the results.”
The sensor is made from electrically conductive graphene, which produces a signal when it interacts with dopamine. In the researchers’ study, dopamine was added to synthetic tears and the sensor accurately detected levels similar to those that have been reported in people with Parkinson’s disease.
Carreño called the process simple and fast.
Long term, Gonçalves and Carreño hope to commercialize and adapt their sensor into a smaller, at-home kit people can purchase at a pharmacy, similar to a glucose test for people living with diabetes.
The researchers said having access to the sensor could help identify Parkinson’s disease in people in the early stages by allowing them to test their dopamine at any time.
Parkinson’s disease itself is not usually listed as a direct cause of death, but it can be fatal because it leads to serious complications over time.
“In the future, it is possible, because you can take this information that you collect in your house very quickly for the hospital, for your doctor and take action,” Carreño said.
