Analysis of rare Parkinson’s disease variants in millions of people
Vanessa Pitz, Mary B. Makarious, Sara Bandrés‐Ciga, Hirotaka Iwaki, Stella Aslibekyan, Adam Auton, Elizabeth Babalola, Robert K. Bell, Jessica Bielenberg, Katarzyna Bryc, Emily Bullis, Daniella Coker, Gabriel Cuéllar-Partida, Devika Dhamija, Sayantan Das, Sarah L. Elson, Nicholas Eriksson, Teresa Filshtein, Alison Fitch, Kipper Fletez‐Brant, Pierre Fontanillas, Will Freyman, Julie M. Granka, Alejandro Hernandez, Barry Hicks, David A. Hinds, Ethan M. Jewett, Yunxuan Jiang, Katelyn Kukar, Alan Kwong, Keng‐Han Lin, Bianca A. Llamas, Maya Lowe, Jey C. McCreight, Matthew H. McIntyre, Steven J. Micheletti, Meghan E. Moreno, Priyanka Nandakumar, Dominique T. Nguyen, Elizabeth S. Noblin, Jared O’Connell, Aaron A. Petrakovitz, G. David Poznik, Alexandra Reynoso, Morgan Schumacher, Anjali J. Shastri, Janie F. Shelton, Jingchunzi Shi, Suyash Shringarpure, Qiaojuan Jane Su, Susana A. Tat, Christophe Toukam Tchakouté, Vinh Tran, Joyce Y. Tung, Xin Wang, Wei Wang, Catherine H. Weldon, Peter Wilton, Corinna D. Wong, Andrew Singleton, Mike A. Nalls, Karl Heilbron, Cornelis Blauwendraat
Abstract
Although many rare variants have been reportedly associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), many have not been replicated or have failed to replicate. Here, we conduct a large-scale replication of rare PD variants. We assessed a total of 27,590 PD cases, 6701 PD proxies, and 3,106,080 controls from three data sets: 23andMe, Inc., UK Biobank, and AMP-PD. Based on well-known PD genes, 834 variants of interest were selected from the ClinVar annotated 23andMe dataset. We performed a meta-analysis using summary statistics of all three studies. The meta-analysis resulted in five significant variants after Bonferroni correction, including variants in GBA1 and LRRK2. Another eight variants are strong candidate variants for their association with PD. Here, we provide the largest rare variant meta-analysis to date, providing information on confirmed and newly identified variants for their association with PD using several large databases. Additionally we also show the complexities of studying rare variants in large-scale cohorts.