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Paper on genetic risk scores in Parkinson’s disease

This month, a new paper was published assessing the genetic overlap between the occurrence of hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. To this end, genome-wide genotyping data on two population-based cohorts was used to build so called polygenic risk scores based on previously published genome-wide association studies. Genotype data for one of these cohorts was generated by the LIGA team and contributed to this international effort led by long-standing LIGA collaborator Prof. Beate Ritz at UCLA, USA. Interestingly, the strongest genetic links were observed with markers for Alzheimer’s but less so for schizophrenia suggesting that mechanisms for hallucinations in Parkinson’s may in part be driven by the same genetic architecture that leads to cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s. The study was published in the journal Neurology Genetics with Drs. Valerija Dobricic, Lars Bertram, and Christina M. Lill as LIGA co-authors.