BACKGROUND:

Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) share pathological features, including amyloid-beta pathology. Amyloid-beta peptide is generated by sequential proteolysis of amyloid precursor protein (APP), and genetic variations in the processing pathway genes have been found to increase the risk of AD; however, the contribution in PD is unknown.

METHODS:

The aim of this study was to investigate whether candidate polymorphisms in five genes (ADAM10, BACE1, BACE2, PSEN2, and CLU) involved in the APP processing pathway affect PD risk in a population-based cohort of patients with incident PD and control subjects from the Norwegian ParkWest study.

RESULTS:

We found an association of rs638405 in BACE1 with increased risk of PD, thus providing a novel link, at the genetic level, between amyloid-beta pathology and PD.