Objective
To test the relationship between clinically relevant types of GBA mutations (none, risk variants, mild mutations, severe mutations) and β-glucocerebrosidase activity in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) in cross-sectional and longitudinal case-control studies.
Methods
481 participants from the Harvard Biomarkers Study (HBS) and the NIH Parkinson Disease Biomarkers Program (PDBP) were analyzed, including 47 PD patients carrying GBA variants (GBA-PD), 247 without a GBA variant (idiopathic PD), and 187 healthy controls. Longitudinal analysis comprised 195 participants with 548 longitudinal measurements over a median follow-up period of 2.0 years (IQR, 1–2 years).
Results
β-Glucocerebrosidase activity was low in blood of patients with GBA-PD compared to healthy controls and patients with idiopathic PD, respectively, in HBS (p < 0.001) and PDBP (p < 0.05) in multivariate analyses adjusting for age, sex, blood storage time, and batch. Enzyme activity in patients with idiopathic PD was unchanged. Innovative Enzymatic Quantitative Trait Locus (xQTL) analysis revealed a negative linear association between residual β-glucocerebrosidase activity and mutation type with p < 0.0001. For each increment in the severity of mutation type, a reduction of mean β-glucocerebrosidase activity by 0.85 μmol/l/h (95% CI, -1.17, -0.54) was predicted. In a first longitudinal analysis, increasing mutation severity types were prospectively associated with steeper declines in β-glucocerebrosidase activity during a median two-years of follow-up (p = 0.02).
Conclusions
Residual activity of the β-glucocerebrosidase enzyme measured in blood inversely correlates with clinical severity types of GBA mutations in PD. β-Glucocerebrosidase activity is a quantitative endophenotype that can be non-invasively monitored and therapeutically targeted.
Source: https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2020/06/15/WNL.0000000000009989