ENIGMA PARKINSON'S DISEASE

Working Group
Dr. Ysbrand van der Werf
Vrije University
Dr. Neda Jahanshad
University of Southern California
Kathleen Poston
University of Stanford University
ENIGMA’s Parkinson's Disease (PD) Working Group, currently led by Ysbrand van der Werf, is determining brain markers of PD across 11 cohorts worldwide (N=1,309 patients/924 controls, age range 27-95), ranked by effect size. This will identify surrogate markers of PD for treatment trials. Our brain imaging markers of PD will be used to compare disease effects to other neurodegenerative disease signatures, e.g. Alzheimer’s disease. Using distributed learning (Zhu 2017), we will build a multivariate predictive disease progression model based on imaging markers as we did in Alzheimer’s disease (Gutman 2013).

QUESTIONS

Do our ‘brain age’ metric and our GWAS and EWAS ‘clocks’ (where such data is available) predict functional decline in PD? Which ‘clocks’ are most predictive?
Preliminary meta-analysis of cortical thickness differences in PD versus controls in 4 sites, 575 PD patients, 386 controls. Highest effect sizes are in pre- & supplementary motor, prefrontal and inferior temporal regions. (Gutman OHBM2018)
Interview with Y. van der Werf
For more info & how to join ENIGMA-Parkinson's, click here.