Parkinson's disease: The prevalence of the LRRK2-G2019S mutation among the population of the South-West of Morocco

Parkinson's disease (PD) was reported to be associated with the G2019S mutation in the leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 gene encoding the LRRK2 protein. Here we investigate the association of this mutation to PD in the population of the South-West of Morocco. For this purpose, we selected 14 PD patients and 251 healthy controls to be included in this study. The mean age of participants was 71.21 ± 13.93 and 68.20 ± 10.7, for patients and healthy controls, respectively. We identified the G2019S mutation in 21.4% of the patients, and only 2% of the healthy controls (OR = 13.42[2.84–63.45]). Significant differences were observed between the patients and the healthy controls regarding the genotypes distribution. The allele A was found to be highly associated with the development of PD in our samples (OR = 16.56[4.18–65.66] (p = 0.0001)). Taken together our results indicated that the G2019S mutation was associated with the development of PD in the population of the South-West of Morocco.