cells Review Extracellular Vesicles in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease: Small Entities with Large Consequences Charysse Vandendriessche 1,2 , Arnout Bruggeman 1,2,3 , Caroline Van Cauwenberghe 1,2 and Roosmarijn E. Vandenbroucke 1,2,* 1 VIB Center for Inflammation Research, VIB, 9052 Ghent, Belgium;
[email protected] (C.V.);
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[email protected] (C.V.C.) 2 Department of Biomedical Molecular Biology, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium 3 Department of Neurology, Ghent University Hospital, 9000 Ghent, Belgium * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +32-9-3313730 Received: 17 October 2020; Accepted: 10 November 2020; Published: 15 November 2020 Abstract: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) are incurable, devastating neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the formation and spreading of protein aggregates throughout the brain. Although the exact spreading mechanism is not completely understood, extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been proposed as potential contributors. Indeed, EVs have emerged as potential carriers of disease-associated proteins and are therefore thought to play an important role in disease progression, although some beneficial functions have also been attributed to them. EVs can be isolated from a variety of sources, including biofluids, and the analysis of their content can provide a snapshot of ongoing pathological changes in the brain. This underlines their potential as biomarker candidates which is of specific relevance in AD and PD where symptoms only arise after considerable and irreversible neuronal damage has already occurred. In this review, we discuss the known beneficial and detrimental functions of EVs in AD and PD and we highlight their promising potential to be used as biomarkers in both diseases.