Scientists have identified 570 genes that act abnormally during the development of Parkinsons Disease, a finding which could help doctors predict the likelihood of it developing, and provide targets for new treatments.

The research published in Neurogenetics, by the team from Imperial College London and the University of Liege, Belgium, uses microarrays to analyse brains from Parkinsons patients. Microarrays are laboratory chips able to pick out which genes are active when different processes are occurring in the brain. When they analysed brains from people with Parkinsons, they found that out of all 25,000 human genes, regulation of 570 was highly abnormal in Parkinsons brains compared with non-diseased brains. This is the first study on Parkinson's disease where all human genes were studied.MORE