PEOPLE of Japanese and European descent who have mutant versions of five genes may be at higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, two large teams of researchers have found. The two independent studies, published in the latest issue of Nature Genetics, involved more than 25,000 participants – the largest studies to try to uncover genetic associations behind Parkinson’s disease. A study in Japan looked only at ethnic Japanese while a second study, in the United States, focused only on people of European heritage.
In the first study, Tatsushi Toda of Japan’s Kobe University and colleagues sequenced the genes of 2,011 participants with the disease and 18,381 others without the disease.
They found that those with the disease had variants of the genes PARK16, BST1, SNCA and LRRK2.
Twin studies
In the second study, researchers led by Andrew Singleton at the National Institutes of Health’s laboratory of neurogenetics in the US analyzed the genes of more than 5,000 patients of European ancestry who suffer from the disease and detected strong links between Parkinson’s and variants of the genes SNCA and MAPT.
The two teams later compared their data and found that variants of PARK16, SNCA and LRRK2 carry risk of Parkinson’s in both Japanese and European populations, while variants of BST1 and MAPT were population-specific.
“With this better understanding of the underlying genetic variants involved in the progress of this disorder, we have more insight into the causes and underlying biology of this disease,” Singleton said. “We hope this new understanding will one day provide us with strategies to delay, or even prevent, the development of Parkinson’s disease.”
Read more: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=419744#ixzz0X3tfiuv0
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