The epigenetic changes associated with Parkinson's disease differ in men and women

According to a new study from Rutgers University, the epigenetic changes associated with Parkinson's disease are different
in men and women.
Parkinson's disease is a neurological disorder that afflicts nearly 1 million Americans
.

In a postmortem analysis of neurons in the brain, the researchers compared samples
from 50 people who died of Parkinson's disease with 50 people who had no signs of the disease.
They found more than 200 genes with different epigenetic markers in diseased and healthy brains, but the affected genes were almost completely different
in men and women.

Senior author Alison Bernstein, assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, said: "You can use two circles to describe genes with different epigenetic markers in Parkinson's disease, one male and one female, and the overlap between the circles contains only five genes
.
" "We found this every time we looked at men and women separately, whether we looked at humans, rats or toxicological models
.
What we call Parkinson's disease, singular, may be the plural of Parkinson's disease
.
”

Parkinson's causes the death
of key neurons in the brain that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Epigenetic changes — changes in how genes work, rather than changes in the underlying genetic code — that cause the disease are not yet fully understood, but the findings provide researchers with hundreds of candidate subjects
.

Bernstein said: "Some of the genes we found have been involved in other studies, but many of them are completely new, so this study opens up many avenues
for further research into how these other genes are associated with Parkinson's.
"

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Parkinson's is a brain disease that affects men in the United States at a higher rate than women, and is the second most common neurodegenerative disease
after Alzheimer's.
While as many as 10% of cases are entirely inherited, the rest appear to be a complex interaction
of genetic, age, and environmental factors.

To further understand the epigenetic markers associated with Parkinson's disease, the researchers took anonymous brain tissue samples
from the parietal cortex of 50 people who died of the middle stage of Parkinson's disease and 50 people with healthy brains.
They separated the male brain from the female brain and then separated the neurons from other types of cells to study the epigenetic changes
in these specific cells before neurons die in Parkinson's patients.

"This study doesn't allow us to say that epigenetic changes in these genes contribute to Parkinson's.

It may be Parkinson's that causes these genetic changes," Bernstein said
.
"We're doing more research in the lab to determine if these changes are causing disease
.
"

Ideally, Bernstein added, this work will help identify genes and pathways
that change early in the disease.
These genes will be potential targets for therapies to prevent or slow disease progression
.

As things stand, efforts to predict, prevent or reverse Parkinson's are progressing at a frustratingly
slow pace.

Physical brain damage and long-term exposure to certain chemicals increase the risk of developing the disease, and caffeine and nicotine consumption reduce this risk
to some extent.
While L-DOPA and several other drugs can relieve symptoms, and some new drug trials are underway, there are currently no approved drugs that can slow the progression of the
disease.