Desorption Electrospray Ionization Imaging for Neurotransmitters Evaluation: A Potential Approach to Parkinson’s Disease Monitoring

Parkinson's disease (PD) is globally known as the most common movement disorder and the second most common neurodegenerative disease. The disease includes the symptoms of involuntary limb tremors, stiffness, or inflexibility of limbs and joints, among others. Due to this, scientific reports on analytical methodologies to evaluate the progression of neurodegenerative diseases are extremely necessary. Traditional methods include histochemical, immunohistochemical, and ligand-based approaches, however, these approaches still suffer from selectivity limitations of association, leading to a wrong evaluation. In this context, mass spectrometry imaging methods, such as desorption electrospray ionization (DESI), are potential approaches to visualize the distribution of biomarkers that can lead to the information on the progress of PD. This review aims to bring a discussion of some DESI methodologies reported in the literature for the assessment of neurotransmitters associated with PD.