These data suggest that parkinsonism caused by mutations in LRRK2 is likely to represent the commonest locus for autosomal dominant Parkinson's disease with a phenotype, pathology and in vivo imaging similar to idiopathic, late-onset Parkinson's disease.
Mutations in the the leucine-rich repeat kinase-2 (LRRK2) gene cause autosomal-dominant Parkinson disease and some cases of sporadic Parkinson disease.
Leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) is the gene responsible for autosomal-dominant Parkinson's disease (PD), PARK8, but the mechanism by which LRRK2 mutations cause neuronal dysfunction remains unknown.
Although clinical symptoms with LRRK2 mutations are similar to those in sporadic PD, their pathologies are heterogeneous and include nigral degeneration with abnormal inclusions containing alpha-synuclein, tau, TAR DNA-binding protein 43, and ubiquitin, or pure nigral degeneration with no protein aggregation pathologies.
In this Commentary, I describe the events that led from an NINDS-sponsored Workshop on Parkinson Disease Research in 1995, where I was asked to speak about the genetics of Parkinson disease, to the identification a mere two years later of a mutation in alpha-synuclein as the cause of autosomal dominant Parkinson disease in the Contursi kindred.
While mutation of alpha-synuclein is a cause of autosomal-dominant Parkinson's disease (PD), it is still elusive as to how alpha-synuclein is involved in the pathogenesis of PD.
Here, we describe 2 novel families in which there is autosomal dominant PD associated with SNCA duplication, and we compare the clinical features of all known patients carrying 3 or 4 SNCA copies.
Mutations in the gene Leucine-Rich Repeat Kinase 2 (LRRK2) were recently identified as the cause of PARK8 linked autosomal dominant Parkinson's disease.
Mutations in the LRRK2 gene cause autosomal-dominant Parkinson's disease (PD), and both LRRK2 as well as RAB7L1 have been implicated in increased susceptibility to idiopathic PD.
However, the discovery that alpha-synuclein is a major component of Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites, the pathological hallmarks of PD, confirmed its role in PD pathogenesis.
Loci underlying autosomal dominant forms of most neurodegenerative disease have been identified: prion mutations cause Gerstmann Straussler syndrome and hereditary Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, tau mutations cause autosomal dominant frontal temporal dementia and alpha-synuclein mutations cause autosomal dominant Parkinson's disease.
Synucleinsare small proteins that are highly expressed in brain tissue and are localised at presynaptic terminals in neurons. alpha-Synuclein has been identified as a component of intracellular fibrillar protein deposits in several neurodegenerative diseases, and two mutant forms of alpha-synuclein have been associated with autosomal-dominant Parkinson's Disease.