Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease. It is generally believed that it is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors, but the precise pathogenesis of PD is unknown to date. In this study, researchers performed computational analyses to detect risk pathways involved in PD using three genome-wide association study (GWAS) datasets. The authors mapped tested SNP markers to autosomal genes in each GWAS dataset; evaluated gene risks; and combined the analysis results of the three datasets to detect the high risk pathways associated with PD. Interestingly, five risk pathways were identified in all three datasets, and there were an additional five pathways which were shared between two datasets. Most of these pathways are associated with the nervous system. Five of these pathways have been reported to be PD-related pathways in previous literature. The findings additionally suggest an importation relationship between immune response and PD.
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PMID:27840232
Zhang, et al. 2017. Neuroscience. 340:398-410
