Optical transition radiation (OTR) which is observed in backward direction when a charged particle beam crosses the boundary between two media with different dielectric properties is widely used as standard technique for transverse beam profile diagnostics in electron linacs. The experience from modern linac based light sources like LCLS or FLASH shows that OTR diagnostics might fail because of coherence effects in the OTR emission process. A possibility to overcome this limitation is to measure at much shorter wavelengths, i.e. in the X-ray region, using parametric X-ray radiation (PXR) which additionally offers the advantage to be generated at crystal planes oriented under a certain angle to the crystal surface, thus allowing a spatial separation from a possible coherent OTR background. A first test experiment has been performed at the Mainz Microtron MAMI in order to study the applicability of PXR for beam diagnostics, and status and results of this experiment are reported