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Parkinson's disease is associated with an increased risk of melanoma (and vice versa). Several hypotheses underline this link, such as pathways affecting both melanin and neuromelanin. For the first time, the fluorescence of melanin and neuromelanin is selectively accessible using a new method of nonlinear spectroscopy, based on a stepwise two-photon excitation. Cutaneous pigmentation and postmortem neuromelanin of Parkinson patients were characterized by fluorescence spectra and compared with controls. Spectral differences could not be documented, implying that there is neither a Parkinson fingerprint in cutaneous melanin spectra nor a melanin-associated fingerprint indicating an increased melanoma risk. Our measurements suggest that Parkinson's disease occurs without a configuration change of neuromelanin. However, Parkinson patients displayed the same dermatofluorescence spectroscopic fingerprint of a local malignant transformation as controls. This is the first comparative retrospective fluorescence analysis of cutaneous melanin and postmortem neuromelanin based on nonlinear spectroscopy in patients with Parkinson's disease and controls, and this method is a very suitable diagnostic tool for melanoma screening and early detection in Parkinson patients. Our results suggest a non-pigmentary pathway as the main link between Parkinson's disease and melanoma, and they do not rule out the melanocortin-1-receptor gene as an additional bridge between both diseases.
Pubmed ID: 31208049
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THIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE.Documented on July 7, 2022. Consortium of 19 brain banks across Europe with an aim to harmonize neuropathological diagnostic criteria and develop gold standards for quality, safety and ethics standards for brain banking. BrainNet Europe also contributes to research on rare diseases, such as: Pick''s disease or other rare forms of dementia, as well as to questions after the events in the aging brain. Anyone can be a donor - irrespective of disease of the central nervous system or not, because for research purposes, one does not only need tissue samples from ill donors, but also from healthy ones for comparison.
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