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CDC outlines national neurological surveillance plans; biomarkers not yet ready for national surveillance
Summary
CDC presented the National Neurological Conditions Surveillance System (NNCSS), its methods and plans to expand prevalence and mortality estimates. CDC said biomarker-based measures are not yet widely available in clinical care and therefore cannot currently be used for national surveillance, though agencies will continue to monitor biomarker advances.
Captain Francisca Evonye of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described NNCSS as a congressionally authorized surveillance program (21st Century Cures Act) that produces population-level estimates for neurological conditions. The CDC presentation said NNCSS has received $5,000,000 in annual appropriations since FY2019 and that initial prevalence estimates for Parkinson's disease were produced for 2019 using the program’s methods.
Evonye said NNCSS’s near-term priorities include expanding surveillance to produce multi-year estimates, estimating mortality, examining urban–rural differences and improving access to findings and user resources. She said CDC will continue peer-reviewed publications and a congressional report under HHS review.
During Q&A, a public member asked whether biomarker-defined prodromal or at-risk populations could be incorporated into future surveillance. Shauna Mercer, lead for NNCSS, replied that public-health surveillance requires measures that are widely available and consistently reported across clinical settings; at present, biomarkers are not uniformly recorded in clinical care and cannot serve as national surveillance measures. Mercer said CDC is following biomarker research closely and will reassess as methods and reporting change.
Panelists from NIH and EPA agreed that linking exposure data, improved epidemiologic study designs and new digital/wearable technologies could strengthen connections between environmental risk factors and Parkinson's outcomes, but they noted technical and data-availability barriers that the council could help address.
