The progress of cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers in patients with neurodegenerative diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases include a heterogeneous group of diseases with complicated and overlapped clinical phenotypes. It is difficult to diagnose or identify this kind of disease due to insidious onset and chronic and progressive development. Since processes in the brain can be monitored by analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), abundant research efforts focus on the efficacy of biomarkers in CSF to indicate specific neurodegenerative lesions and to assist the diagnosis process, assessing whether one biomarker or several biomarkers together could be the reliable tools for diagnosis of specific neurodegenerative diseases. This article mainly reviews the research status and supplementary value in diagnosis and differentiation of CSF biomarkers in common degenerative diseases [e.g. multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)].