Making Strides in Chronic Disease Diagnosis

A few years ago, the Howard Florey Institute, known as Australia's Brain Research Institute and the University of Melbourne has a mjor breakthrough in developing a cost-effective diagnostic test for Parkinson's Disease (PD). The disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system and typcially affects a person's motor skills, speech, and other functions.

The breakthrough could allow PD to be diagnosed on a chip at the cost of $500 versus nearly $4,000 for a diagnostic test. That is a huge decrease in cost. The PD Gene Chip, as it is called, opens up doors for future understanding of Parkinson's disease and also of gene testing. The need for such a test is high, as it ix expected that over the next 25 years the number of case of Parkinson's Disease Worldwide is expected to double in the world's most populous countries. This again underscores the need for addressing the problems of chronic disease in developing countries.

Unfortunately, much research about chronic diseases results in expensive diagnosis and treatment. And while $500 for a diagnostic test is not cheap, comparing that to $4,000 is remarkable and an important step in driving up the innovation and down the costs of diagnosing conditions not typically thought of as being urgent problems in developing countries.