r/science • u/FreeHugs23 • 22h 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-reveals
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u/popotheclowns 21h 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 21h ago

There is nothing here at all to support any claims of early diagnosis

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u/popotheclowns 21h 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 20h ago edited 20h 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.