The Story of Two Diseases: Gaucher and Parkinson's
Gaucher disease affects no more than one in 100,000 people in most populations, with an estimated 5,400 cases in the United States. On the other-hand as many as 3 million to 4 million Americans are estimated to have Parkinson's disease.
An international team led by a National Institutes of Health researcher has found that carriers of Gaucher disease face a risk of developing Parkinson's disease more than five times greater than the general public. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The initial onset of Parkinson's Disease is consistent with there being a combination deficiency of those substances known to be essential for the formation of dopamine.
On the other hand, Gaucher Disease is a lysosomal storage disorder caused by a deficiency in acid β-
glucosidase, the lysosomal enzyme responsible for the catabolism of the glycolipid glucosylceramide.
The details are not clear yet but two different mechanisms somehow intersect.
The international collaboration studied two common GBA variants in 5,691 people with Parkinson's disease, including 780 Ashkenazi Jews, and compared them to 4,898 disease-free individuals, including 387 Ashkenazi Jews.
In short, what so far has been done was to actually get two large data-sets on both diseases together so that a more comprehensive and clearer picture of these mechanisms is painted.
As more data accumulates in global databases, which is analyzed using cutting edge computational approaches we learn more about common mechanisms of diseases.
Recent revolutionary understanding about chronic diseases such as cancer, Heart disease, diabetes is a good example that denotes the common mechanisms of different diseases.
Google should also be involved in this global event. At least, Google cofounder Sergei Brin is diagnosed with a predisposition to Parkinson's Disease using a computational power approach.
The motto is;
"I analyze the data with computational power, so I exist."
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