A genome-wide association study of young onset Parkinson's disease in European ancestry

Young onset Parkinson's disease may be caused by biallelic mutations in PRKN or other autosomal recessive Parkinson's disease genes, but the majority of patients do not carry known monogenic variants. Previous studies have found an increased cumulative burden of common genetic risk variants for Parkinson's disease in young onset patients, but the specific genetic architecture of non-monogenic young onset Parkinson's disease is not well characterized. We conducted a genome-wide association study of 1,528 Parkinson's disease patients with symptom onset between 18 and 40 years and 20,408 controls of European ancestry using data from The Global Parkinson's Genetic Program, the International Parkinson's Disease Genomics Consortium, and the NeuroGenetics Research Consortium. We performed meta-analyses of additive and recessive regression models and investigated associations between age at onset groups and different polygenic risk scores. An additive model meta-analysis identified six independent loci passing a genome-wide significance threshold, including three loci identified in previous genome-wide association studies (near SNCA, GBA1, and HIP1R) and two loci not previously associated with Parkinson's disease (rs74950462, P = 1.24x10^-8 and rs72848817, P = 4.89x10^-8). Furthermore, we identified a significant signal at the PRKN locus, prompting a follow-up analysis employing a recessive model. The recessive genome-wide association meta-analysis identified nine loci passing a genome-wide significance threshold, including SNCA, PRKN, and seven novel variants. Patients with onset between 18 and 40 years had significantly higher polygenic risk scores than later onset patients when the score was modelled specifically on genome-wide association statistics from independent young onset Parkinson's disease participants versus healthy controls. This increased polygenic burden was driven in part by loci harbouring mitochondrial pathway genes. Our results indicate that previously unidentified common and low-frequency variants contribute specifically to the young onset subgroup of Parkinson's disease. Association signals detected uniquely with a recessive model suggest that genetic susceptibility to young onset Parkinson's disease may be partially driven by homozygous variation, in line with previous reports of increased runs of homozygosity in this particular group of patients and may be consistent with a loss of function mechanism. The findings support the notion of young onset Parkinson's disease as a partly distinct subphenotype and highlight the mitochondrial pathway. These results may have implications for future precision medicine but should be interpreted with caution pending independent replication.