article_snippet.sent: In people with Parkinson's disease, dopamine-producing cells in part of the brain called the substantia nigra are killed off, leading to tremors, slowness of movement, and difficulty walking .
article_snippet.sent: Scientists have developed a six-minute test which could give an early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.
article_snippet.sent: Currently Parkinson's patients only discover Scientists have the debilitating neurological problem when the symptoms have already taken hold.
article_snippet.sent: But last year Oxford University academics have come up with a new way of spotting Parkinson's disease at an early stage.
article_snippet.sent: Oxford University academics were able to detect Parkinson's disease with a remarkable 85 per cent accuracy.
article_snippet.sent: Even at a very early stage, Parkinson's patients had much weaker connections in the basal ganglia region of the brain, which is associated with motor control.
article_snippet.sent: they also found that the test had a very low chance of incorrectly diagnosing healthy people with Parkinson's disease.
article_snippet.sent: The team is now planning a larger study of Parkinson's patients.
article_snippet.sent: People are usually diagnosed with Parkinson's disease five to 10 years after the beginning of Parkinson's disease, and lot of the damage has already been done, they say.
article_snippet.sent: John Growdon, director of the Memory and Movement Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, says it will be important for they to demonstrate in future studies that the typing deficiencies correlate with the severity of Parkinson's disease. '