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Genome-Wide Association Study of Parkinson Disease: Genes and Environment

This is a gene-environment study of Parkinson's disease. PD is a common, progressive, age-related, movement disorder that affects 1-2% of the people over the age of 65. The NeuroGenetics Research Consortium (NGRC) is the infrastructure of the study. Protocols and methods are standardized across NGRC clinics and labs as much as possible. The 2000 patients and 2000 control subjects selected for this GWAS were recruited at the NGRC-affiliated movement disorder clinics in Oregon, Washington, Georgia and New York. All 4000 subjects were white and all DNA samples were extracted from whole blood and unamplified. Seventy-five percent of subjects have data on cigarette smoking and caffeinated coffee consumption, which are inversely associated with PD risk. This study population represents the norm for clinical genetic studies of PD; i.e., NGRC estimates of risk to relatives, heritability, genotype frequencies, and exposure frequencies (see references) are very close to estimates from meta-analyses.