Inflammatory Mediators as Biomarkers in Brain Disorders

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer, Parkinson, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and
Huntington are incurable and debilitating conditions that result in progressive death of the neurons. The
definite diagnosis of a neurodegenerative disorder is disadvantaged by the difficulty in obtaining biopsies
and thereby to validate the clinical diagnosis with pathological results. Biomarkers are valuable indicators
for detecting different phases of a disease such as prevention, early onset, treatment, progression,
and monitoring the effect of pharmacological responses to a therapeutic intervention. Inflammation
occurs in neurodegenerative diseases, and identification and validation of molecules involved in this
process could be a strategy for finding new biomarkers. The ideal inflammatory biomarker needs to be
easily measurable, must be reproducible, not subject to wide variation in the population, and unaffected
by external factors. Our review summarizes the most important inflammation biomarkers currently available,
whose specificity could be utilized for identifying and monitoring distinctive phases of different
neurodegenerative diseases.