A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies 17 new Parkinson's disease risk loci

Nature Genetics 49, 1511 (2017). doi:10.1038/ng.3955 Authors: Diana Chang, Mike A Nalls, Ingileif B Hallgrímsdóttir, Julie Hunkapiller, Marcel van der Brug, Fang Cai, Geoffrey A Kerchner, Gai Ayalon, Baris Bingol, Morgan Sheng, David Hinds, Timothy W Behrens, Andrew B Singleton, Tushar R Bhangale & Robert R Graham Common variant genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have, to date, identified >24 risk loci for Parkinson's disease (PD). To discover additional loci, we carried out a GWAS comparing 6,476 PD cases with 302,042 controls, followed by a meta-analysis with a recent study of over 13,000 PD cases and 95,000 controls at 9,830 overlapping variants. We then tested 35 loci (P < 1 × 10−6) in a replication cohort of 5,851 cases and 5,866 controls. We identified 17 novel risk loci (P < 5 × 10−8) in a joint analysis of 26,035 cases and 403,190 controls. We used a neurocentric strategy to assign candidate risk genes to the loci. We identified protein-altering or cis–expression quantitative trait locus (cis-eQTL) variants in linkage disequilibrium with the index variant in 29 of the 41 PD loci. These results indicate a key role for autophagy and lysosomal biology in PD risk, and suggest potential new drug targets for PD.
Source: Nature Genetics - Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Authors: Tags: Letter Source Type: research