A blood-based gene signature characterizing Idiopathic Parkinson's disease

Establishing reliable biomarkers for assessing and validating clinical diagnosis at early prodromal stages of Parkinson’s disease is crucial for developing therapies to slow or halt disease progression. Here, we present the largest study to date using whole blood gene expression profiling from over 500 individuals to identify an 87-gene blood-based signature. Our gene signature effectively differentiates between idiopathic PD patients and controls in both a validation cohort and an independent test cohort, and further highlights mitochondrial metabolism and ubiquitination/proteasomal degradation as potential pathways disrupted in Parkinson’s disease. This repository contains the gene expression profiles collected in the GENEPARK consortium. The main study sought a classifier for IPD. These data contain 233 healthy controls, 205 IPD patients, and 48 patients with other neurodegenerative diseases (NDD). Other samples are available in the data and can be used for additional analyses. The largest class of these additional samples are 22 samples from genetic unaffected controls and 41 genetic PD patients.