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By Nancy Lapid, Health Science Editor

Hello Health Rounds readers! Today we feature important new discoveries that could lead to faster and easier diagnoses of neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and to potential new treatments for multiple sclerosis. We also report on a study that found people who had COVID-19 may be less likely to require care for a range of neurological disorders in the next year than those with the flu.

In breaking news, see these stories from our Reuters journalists: US surgeons perform first pig-to-human kidney transplant; US Medicare to cover Wegovy for heart disease patients; global fertility rates to decline, shifting population burden to low-income countries; Neuralink’s first brain-chip patient plays online chess; dengue outbreak in Argentina on track to break records; and WHO warns cholera outbreak could flare up again in Haiti. Plus, here’s a list of the biggest cyberattacks in the US healthcare sector.

COVID-19 is no more likely than influenza to be associated with new neurological problems in the year following infection, a study in hospitalized patients found. Scroll down for details. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

An abnormal protein in nerve cells that is a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease and other degenerative nervous system disorders is detectable with a skin biopsy, neurologists reported in JAMA.

They hope to eventually use skin biopsies to help diagnose patients and support clinical trials of drugs that target this protein, known as alpha-synuclein.

Conditions like Parkinson’s, known as synucleinopathies, are  diagnosed based mainly on symptoms. Experimental blood tests are in development, but currently patients are often misdiagnosed or experience delays in diagnosis, study leader Dr. Christopher Gibbons of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston said in a statement.

“With a simple, minimally-invasive skin biopsy test… we can more objectively identify the underlying pathology of synucleinopathies and offer better diagnostic answers and care for patients,” Gibbons said.

His team performed skin biopsies on 277 patients with confirmed synucleinopathies and 151 healthy volunteers. Biopsies showed alpha-synuclein in 93% of patients with Parkinson’s disease, 96% of those with Lewy body dementia, 98% with multiple system atrophy, and in all patients diagnosed with pure autonomic failure, they reported.

Only 3% of the healthy volunteers had this protein in nerve cells, and the researchers said they believe these may have been people at high risk for eventually developing one of these disorders.

The next step will be to validate the findings in patients not yet formally diagnosed with one of these conditions, the researchers said.

Read more about diagnosing Parkinson’s disease on Reuters.com

• Blood test for Parkinson’s disease promising in early study

Brain cells called astrocytes can develop their own immunological memory that gives them the ability to respond to previously encountered foreign substances, a function that may contribute to chronic neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis (MS), according to new research.

The body’s response to foreign substances, or antigens, with greater speed and intensity on re-exposure mainly involves immune system cells called lymphocytes, in particular, B cells and T cells.

Researchers have discovered that some astrocytes – non-immune cells primarily involved in cognition – can develop faster and stronger inflammatory responses to stimuli they recognize from previous exposures, according to a report published on Wednesday in Nature.

The phenomenon in these astrocytes is driven by the enzymes p300 and ATP-citrate lyase, the report says.

The number of astrocytes with these enzymes was higher in mice with MS and in tissue samples from patients with the disease. In the mice, turning off the genes for these enzymes suppressed central nervous system inflammation and disease progression, the researchers also found.

“These findings highlight important mechanisms relevant to neurologic disorders like MS and could guide the development of novel therapeutic interventions that target (such astrocytes) to reduce inflammation,” study leader Francisco Quintana of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said in a statement.

People with COVID-19 are less likely to need medical care for neurologic disorders within the next year than people who have the flu, new research suggests.

The study looked at healthcare claims data on 77,272 people who were hospitalized with COVID-19 and the same number of people hospitalized with influenza.

In the year after infection, 2.8% of those with COVID developed a neurologic condition, compared to 4.9% of those who had influenza, researchers reported on Wednesday in Neurology.

After accounting for patients’ individual risk factors, people hospitalized for COVID-19 had a 35% lower risk of receiving care for migraine, a 22% lower risk of receiving care for epilepsy, a 44% lower risk of receiving treatment for nerve pain, a 36% lower risk of receiving care for movement disorders, a 10% lower risk for stroke and a 7% lower risk for dementia, compared to those hospitalized with the flu.

“Our study did not look at long COVID outcomes, and our results do not necessarily conflict with the findings in other research showing an increase in neurologic symptoms in people with long COVID,” study leader Dr. Brian Callaghan of University of Michigan Health in Ann Arbor said in a statement.

His team notes that patients in their claims database are not a nationally representative sample, so the results may not be the same for all patients in the United States.

This newsletter was edited by Bill Berkrot.

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