Brain, Vol. 126, No. 6, 1250-1251,
June 2003
© 2003 Guarantors of Brain
doi: 10.1093/brain/awg189
Editorial |
Parkin mutations and early onset parkinsonism
1 The Medical School, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Several recent articles have considered novel therapies in Parkinson’s disease, ranging from controlled trials of cell transplantation techniques in patients through to experimental treatments with iron chelation therapy in animal models of the disease. Alongside such reports are frequent papers on the genetics of Parkinson’s disease, the disorder once considered to be a key example of a ‘non-genetic disease’. This issue of Brain is no exception, containing two reports on parkin mutations in early onset parkinsonism.
Mutations in parkin were first identified in 1998, in Japanese patients with autosomal recessive juvenile parkinsonism (Kitada et al., 1998
). Subsequently parkin mutations were detected in cases of autosomal recessive early onset (<45 years) parkinsonism, in isolated young onset cases presenting as fairly typical Parkinson’s disease and in familial cases with