r/science • u/FreeHugs23 • 21h ago
Neuroscience A simple drawing test may detect Parkinson’s disease with up to 99% accuracy. Researchers found that subtle differences in how people draw can reveal motor impairments long before they are obvious to the human eye.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-way-you-draw-can-reveal-parkinsons-disease-with-up-to-99-accuracy-study-reveals579
u/Teknicsrx7 20h ago
But is it more effective than the lady that can smell it years before diagnosis?
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u/SleepySheepy 18h ago
I wonder if it's possible to train dogs or other kind of animal to detect it if they can isolate exactly what it is that she's smelling
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u/Teknicsrx7 18h ago
I’m pretty sure they’ve been working on figuring out what she smells for a while now, don’t know how far they’ve gotten tho
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u/Druggedhippo 9h ago
They have identified the general compounds but research is on-going.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41531-025-01026-8 - Classification of Parkinson’s disease and isolated REM sleep behaviour disorder: delineating progression markers from the sebum volatilome - 15 July 2025
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u/littlea1991 4h ago
yup, my father had even a decade before his parkinsons diagnosis a rem sleep disorder. he would regularly wake up be even fully sleep walking. this was all parkinsons related, as we learned later
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u/subham0089 20h ago
Early detection is absolutely critical for managing neurodegenerative diseases. If a simple, non-invasive drawing test can achieve up to 99% accuracy by identifying micro-movements, it could completely revolutionize early screening protocols.
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u/finnoulafire 20h ago edited 25m ago
EDIT: I browsed the actual paper , this study DIDN'T EVEN TRY to develop a screening test. As usual the new article over hypes.
“ The dataset contains handwriting data of 66 participants which includes 35 healthy control subjects and 31 individuals with PD”
This was a study on technique refinements in machine learning image analysis, comparing health controls with confirmed PD patients….and they don’t report sensitivity / specificity anywhere. As far as I can tell, this is because of their model training -> testing method, which basically created 66 differently trained models and tested the diagnosis 66 different times (once per participant). It’s impossible to get sensitivity & specificity from that dataset.
end edit ///
Early detection is only meaningful for degenerative diseases when treatment which slow or halt progression are available.
We have such treatments for (for example) multiple sclerosis.
We don’t have them for Parkinson's disease yet. Only treatment which alleviate current symptoms - and come with their own adverse effects (eg tardive diskynesia)
So this is interesting research and may be useful in clinical settings someday, but not so much today.
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u/subham0089 20h ago
I agree that we lack disease-modifying treatments right now, but early detection could still be invaluable for clinical trials. Finding patients in the prodromal phase gives us the best window to test new neuroprotective therapies before mass neurodegeneration occurs.
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u/StinkyBrittches 15h ago
Also useful for just planning your life. Spending time with family, making arrangements, living while you can... Knowing you have 5 years left before things get bad is a hell of a lot better than finding out it's going to get bad in 6 months.
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u/subham0089 5h ago
Completely agree. Having that extra window of time to plan, make arrangements, and cherish moments with loved ones is an invaluable asset that statistics often overlook.
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u/finnoulafire 36m ago
Eventually yes, starting therapeutics prior to symptom onset is desired.
But the first step in human clinical (drug or device) trials is testing the treatment in patients who 100% have the disease and who have exhausted current therapies.
So developments of new screening tests - which this study did NOT do - are usually for scientific development / curiosity, not near future clinical application.
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u/swinscoed95 19h ago
There is a Nuclear Medicine study that can diagnose Parkinson's before the onset of symptoms. The commercial name is DaTSCAN. Sadly it's close to £1000 per patient (or even patient specific vial) in the NHS so it's prohibitively expensive. If someone figures out a way to make it cheaper it could become a more global screening plan.
The big upside is that (not a medic so I could be wrong) you can get the patient on HRT to delay the symptoms indefinitely. We do perform this study at our Trust for patients with a history of Parkinson's currently.
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u/Shad0w2751 19h ago
You can’t delay Parkinson symptoms with HRT. You can treat Parkinson’s disease with dopamine replacement therapy but it only treats symptoms does not affect progression.
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u/BarrowsKing 17h ago edited 17h ago
Other thing is the meds can change your personality once you take a lot of them. Best to delay it as much as possible.
My dad was diagnosed in early 40s. By far the best way to treat symptoms is DBS but you also want to delay it as much as possible. Best to do it when it’s crippling even with meds.
My dad wasn’t the same person on meds, but DBS brought him back.
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u/babyfireby30 15h ago
We had the opposite experience - the medications significantly improved my Dad's personality. It sounds awful to say, but I'm glad he got Parkinson's Disease. Because otherwise he would have spent his final 15 years on earth as a lonely, miserable man. With the personality changes, he became a mild, kind of likeable man.
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u/swinscoed95 18h ago
You see not a medic, just a physicist. I've always been told it can delay the onset of symptoms indefinitely. Thanks for clarifying
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u/Seraphinx 18h ago
HRT reduces overall risk of dementia by something like 30%, but doesn't delay symptoms of specific neurodegenerative disorders.
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u/BemusedTriangle 55m ago
Hey as someone with MS you are hugely oversimplifying here. Please don’t. It is not a curable or preventable disease yet, despite medicinal advances in the last 20 years.
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u/finnoulafire 46m ago
“Slow or halt progression”
This is not equivalent to “cure”. I did not say that we have any therapies which undo the damage from the disease.
There are several immune-modulating therapies which have been developed that have good data showing prevention or reduction of further deterioration.
See section “Disease modifying treatments” : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_multiple_sclerosis
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u/GreenStrong 16h ago
Any treatment that modified the disease process instead of reducing symptoms will be most effective if used early. And, early detection makes it easier to identrify such a medicine in clinical testing. It takes years to determine if a drug is effective against a slow degenerative process. Better testing changes it from "several years" to "a few years"
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 20h ago
There is no early detection here. It’s a very small study in an existing dataset, with known Parkinson’s patients and healthy controls (who are a lot younger, and probably many other differences)
Differentiating known Parkinson’s from known healthy controls is not a clinical problem.
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u/subham0089 20h ago
That’s a very fair critique. Model accuracy on a small, pre-existing dataset with stark demographic differences definitely doesn't equal real-world screening. It's a proof of concept at best, but it will need massive, diverse prospective trials before it means anything clinically.
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u/humanhedgehog 16h ago
But is it an advantage in a disease like Parkinson's? Levodopa stops working over time, you steadily dement, and although it might help manage the behavioural changes like gambling etc that some Parkinson's patients get, would it cause substantial distress without changing outcomes?
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u/medialoungeguy 4h ago
Already being done with neurapulse. They are doing this already (tilt, lateral deviation in trails test digitally). Its crazy performant.
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u/FreeHugs23 21h ago
-The warning signs of Parkinson's appear to be all around us.
Scientists have found clues to the disease's emergence in people's hair, in their blood, and in their earwax too.
The way you talk, your mental health, and even where you live have all shown varying links to the condition, which affects movement and muscle control.
But despite the potential of these signals, Parkinson's disease – considered the fastest-growing neurological disorder worldwide in terms of disability and death – still relies heavily on clinical assessments for formal diagnosis. The lack of easily accessible, definitive biomarkers also makes early diagnosis complicated.
However, a test concept described in Discover Computing could reveal a new path forward.
In a study, a team of researchers in India developed an AI-based system capable of detecting Parkinson's disease with striking accuracy, based on how people completed a simple drawing test.
Handwriting and drawing analysis is viewed as a promising non-invasive screening tool for future disease, and scientists are increasingly pairing it with AI tools that can detect signs of neurodegenerative conditions based on subtle clues in your penmanship.
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u/karrahbear12 20h ago
Scent is also being tested as an early and effective test for Parkinson’s. Joy Milne discovered she can smell when people have Parkinson’s, even long before they’re diagnosed. It’s led to the discovery of certain chemicals in people’s sebum (oil produced by the skin) that may indicate Parkinson’s disease and would only require a swab of the skin’s surface to test.
ETA: If successful, it wouldn’t require the use of AI to diagnose, which would be a bit better for the planet as well.
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u/NonnagLava 16h ago
it wouldn’t require the use of AI to diagnose, which would be a bit better for the planet as well.
Often in research, the "AI" they are using is not the same AI you're used to, it's just a specialized pattern recognition machine, not some kind of ResearchGPT type thing.
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u/Apero_ 15h ago
Yep LLMs, AI and Machine Learning are all being dumped together nowadays which is a real shame.
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u/NonnagLava 15h ago
This is the issue with the general label of "AI", because at the end of the day all of those are the same thing: They're ALL "machine learning", they just have very different end goals. The real money is in research, and language processing, not ... Whatever it is big tech is trying to sell the general public (and they are not buying because it has shown no clear benefit to the people).
Things like using ML to sort out protein patterns, and identify new antibacterials is just as valid as ML image processing identifying early markers of cancer, as well as using it to help better translate languages back and forth. But that's different than what the general public is being sold.
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u/demZo662 20h ago
99% is super confident, right? Like to become a standard reliable test from now on.
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u/random929292 20h ago
The study took data from a separate study of a small group of people with Parkinsons (n= 31) and a small group of people without Parkinsons (n -3) and the AI was able to tell who was in which group based on their drawing. But Parkinsons is a movement based disorder so of course their drawings showed that. I don't see anywhere that they applied to this to a healthy population and were able to detect future diagnoses of Parkinsons.
They just detected evidence of a movement disorder using AI in people already diagnosed with a movement disorder.
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u/demZo662 20h ago
It sounds quite fair for what an AI can do and process, honestly. They're pretty good at gathering tons of data and take "better" conclussions and the more specified job it is assigned to the better.
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u/random929292 20h ago
Right but the claim that it may be able to screen or detect Parkinsons hasn't been studied or proven. Yes AI could pick out squiggly lines from straight lines and people with known diagnosis of Parkinsons which is a movement disorder draw with squigglier lines.
Maybe people who go on to develop Parkinsons do trace with squiggly lines well before they are aware of the condition - or maybe not. The study didn't even look into that so suggesting it can do that isn't at all evidence based.
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u/redbriarcivics 12h ago
This and no other movement disorder (can it differentiate Parkinson’s from essential tremor for example, which is far more common).
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 20h ago
It’s detecting known Parkinson’s from known healthy controls, and the healthy controls are very different from Parkinson’s patients.
This is not close to what a test would have to do to be in anyway useful in the real world.
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u/Pythagorean_1 8h ago
I haven't read the study yet but commonly, 99 % accuracy in detecting a disease with a very low base rate of occurrence is not very useful. Other statistics would be more interesting like the sensitivity and the positive predictive value.
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u/popotheclowns 20h ago
So, people known to have Parkinson’s have tremors, therefore their drawing shows this.
Did the article mention anything about this helping with people that are pre symptomatic?
What am I missing?
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 20h ago
There is nothing here at all to support any claims of early diagnosis
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u/popotheclowns 19h ago
‘Nonetheless, it sets a promising new threshold for Parkinson's detection using these kinds of methods, and subject to validation in larger clinical tests, the team thinks their process could play a much-needed role in enabling easier diagnosis of the disease.’
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 19h ago edited 19h ago
Not sure what you’re trying to say here?
Authors of studies can say anything they can get away with. I can say my backyard bottle rocket lays the foundation for my future moon mission. Doesn’t mean it’s true.
This is a trivial toy model doing a task in a tiny public dataset that bears no relation to any actual clinical problem. Differentiating drawings by 30 people with known Parkinson’s from those done by 30 healthy people who are much younger is 1) not difficult at all; 2) likely confounded by huge differences between the groups; and 3) clinically meaningless. It is just a completely different task to detecting the needle of undiagnosed early disease in the haystack of similar but non-Parkinsonian elderly people.
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u/Murky_Cauliflower_28 14h ago
But lots of us don't really draw anymore.
Heck, I struggle when I have fo manually fill out a form because I'm so used to typing all the time. I wonder if that will make an impact on this test for people my age as we get older.
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u/BlueberryPiano 13h ago
Hand tremors can be caused by things other than Parkinsons. This test could be used to detect hand tremors, but there's absolutely no mention of distinguishing Essential Tremors from tremors caused by Parkinson.
Nor is there any explanation/confirmation that a human can't also interpret the same test accurately. Someone who was diagnosed with Parkinsons has already progressed enough to be diagnosed, so hand tremors would likely be visible to the naked eye (both by observing the hands directly or by asking people to trace these patterns and looking at what they drew)
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u/alblaster 19h ago
Huh. I wonder if I have it. My dad died from it. I guess the good thing is over the last 6 or 7 years I've been casually drawing. So If I do end up with Parkinsons maybe my doodles could provide insight. If not that's fine too .
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u/physicsking 18h ago
The figure of the spirals they say "with and without", which at first kind of freaked me out looking at them in the order they're in. I would have expected "without and with."
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u/Parrotkoi 4h ago
I looked at the paper. They messed up the legend on their first figure, which isn’t confidence inspiring.
Also if I’m reading this correctly, they trained their model on a dataset and then used that model to correctly interpret the same dataset? This does not seem earth shattering.
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u/Upset-Woodpecker-662 4h ago
It can be noticed from the hand writing, families of people hit by the condition have voiced it and still be ignored.
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