Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease: a Mendelian randomization study

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) are the top two common neurodegenerative diseases in elderly. Recent studies found the α-synuclein have a key role in AD. Although many clinical and pathological features between AD and PD are shared, the genetic association between them remains unclear, especially whether α-synuclein in PD genetically alters AD risk. RESULTS: We did not obtain any significant result (OR = 0.918, 95% CI: 0.782–1.076, P = 0.291) in MR analysis between PD and AD risk. In MR between α-synuclein in PD with AD risk, we only extracted rs356182 as the IV through a strict screening process. The result indicated a significant association based on IVW method (OR = 0.638, 95% CI: 0.485–0.838, P = 1.20E-03). In order to examine the robustness of the IVW method, we used other three complementary analytical methods and also obtained consistent results. CONCLUSION: The overall PD genetic risk factors did not predict AD risk, but the α-synuclein susceptibility genetic variants in PD reduce the AD risk. We believe that our findings may help to understand the association between them, which may be useful for future genetic studies for both diseases. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12881-018-0721-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.