Genetics and Treatment Response in Parkinson ’s Disease: An Update on Pharmacogenetic Studies

AbstractParkinson ’s disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a progressive loss of dopamine neurons of the central nervous system. The disease determines a significant disability due to a combination of motor symptoms such as bradykinesia, rigidity and rest tremor and non-motor symptom s such as sleep disorders, hallucinations, psychosis and compulsive behaviors. The current therapies consist in combination of drugs acting to control only the symptoms of the illness by the replacement of the dopamine lost. Although patients generally receive benefits from this symptomatic pharmaco logical management, they also show great variability in drug response in terms of both efficacy and adverse effects. Pharmacogenetic studies highlighted that genetic factors play a relevant influence in this drug response variability. In this review, we tried to give an overview of the recent progre sses in the pharmacogenetics of PD, reporting the major genetic factors identified as involved in the response to drugs and highlighting the potential use of some of these genomic variants in the clinical practice. Many genes have been investigated and several associations have been reported especia lly with adverse drug reactions. However, only polymorphisms in few genes, includingDRD2,COMT andSLC6A3, have been confirmed as associated in different populations and in large cohorts. The identification of genomic biomarkers involved in drug response variability represents an...
Source: NeuroMolecular Medicine - Category: Neurology Source Type: research