Progressive Supranuclear Palsy: A Review

Abstract

Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) is a rare neurodegenerative disease which is caused by 4 repeat tau proteins.  PSP has a low diagnosis rate because it is underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed as other common diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD). A systematic and comprehensive literature review has been conducted with evidence from various sources in the databases of PubMed, Google Scholar, and JSTOR.  A synthesis was conducted based on “Progressive Supranuclear Palsy” in etiology and differential diagnosis was conducted based on “‘Parkinson’s disease’ on the way to progressive supranuclear palsy: a review on PSP-parkinsonism.”  From the results we can see that there is a lack of research overall for PSP and it is greatly understudied. One area that needs to be focused on is the treatment for disease-modifying symptoms of PSP as mostly only PD medications are used even though both the diseases are vastly different.  A systematic literature review has been done on the topic of PSP regarding the current advances. In general, the diagnosis of PSP is lacking as there is misdiagnosis between one of the PSP subtypes, PSP-Parkinsonism (PSP-P), and PD while there is also underdiagnosis as they symptoms of PSP-Richardson’s Syndrome is seen as natural aging. The lack of early diagnosis and validated biomarkers makes it difficult to find a treatment for PSP.  With the lack of information about PSP it is imperative that systematic research needs to be done so that patients have a favorable course and better standard of living.