A disproportionate majority of PD genomic work has been done in European and American cohorts. Although Africa is home to the deepest human genetic variation on Earth, it remains almost entirely uncharacterized and the case for starting with genomics in Africa may not be straightforward.
With about 98% of PD cases in Africa being sporadic, gene–environment interactions almost likely drive most disease phenotypes, speculatively. African populations carry a distinctive exposure landscape such as high lifetime infectious disease burden and occupational/ environmental exposures (agrochemicals, artisanal mining, manganese) that remain rarely studied in this context.
Mapping exposures before interrogating mechanisms as it is done in infectious disease research might be worthwhile. Without a proper exposure framework, genetic findings in African PD cohorts risk being decontextualized.
Thanks for this perspective, @ekaamewu. You mentioned that this exposure landscape (infectious disease burden and occupational/environmental exposures) remain largely unstudied – do you know of ongoing work that addresses these issues/gaps?
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One goal is prevention. Toward that goal, we are looking at both nutrition and environmental factors and making great progress.
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as findings in limited cohorts don’t apply across the global scale, same approaches are also not suitable for every community so i completely agree with your take Kobla! i also want to add that i know there are a lot of efforts that harmonize data from different communities, and it’s absolutely awesome, we should all be doing more to give more representation to all communities. but i’m a firm believer that at least some of the authors should have first hand knowledge about the communities being studied. i think at times findings get misinterpreted when the study teams use existing data without involving any experts familiar with the community
Good morning! I think it is something worth investigating. I know our TB genetics group has proposed a few ideas for a collaboration with the PD group but no projects/ funding has been established to take it further.
There are a few projects looking at environmental exposures in PD in Africa. I know it’s also of interest to GP2 for which some researchers have ongoing work