ABSTRACT
Eighty years after James Parkinson wrote his “Essay On the Shaking Palsy,” Gowers (1) suggested that genetics may play a substantial role in Parkinson’s disease (PD), a view shared by Charcot’s student Leroux, who stated, “A true cause of paralysis agitans, and perhaps the only true one, is heredity.” The past two decades have witnessed the field attempting to characterize the nature of this genetic influence and to identify genes that underlie and contribute to disease. While a role for genetics in PD has been established, the weight and mode of this contribution is still largely unknown. Here, we discuss the genetic advances in parkinsonism and the potential for further research in this area.
