{"doi":"10.1002/mds.29042","title":"Black and African American Connections to Parkinson's Disease Study: Addressing Missing Diversity in Parkinson's Disease Genetics","abstract":"Our current understanding of Parkinson's disease and atypical parkinsonism-related syndromes is disproportionately based on studying populations of European ancestry, leading to a significant gap of knowledge concerning clinical features, genetics, and pathophysiology underlying disease etiology in underrepresented populations, including Black and African American individuals. To date, an increasing number of common susceptibility loci for Parkinson's disease, along with rare and deleterious genetic variants responsible for monogenic cases,1, 2 are well established in populations of European, Latino and Asian ancestry.3-5 Nevertheless, the impact of both causal and risk genetic factors on Parkinson's disease in Black and African American individuals remains largely unknown. Notably, our preliminary scientific observations based on genetic assessments show significantly different distributions of cumulative genetic risk in the Black American and African American population in comparison with the European population when applying a genetic risk score composed of the 90 risk loci previously linked to European populations (Fig. 1). As part of our commitment to address the lack of representation in genetics research, the Global Parkinson's Genetics Program (GP2)6 (https://gp2.org/), supported by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson's initiative7 and in collaboration with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, has recently launched the Black and African American Connections to Parkinson's Disease (BLAAC PD) study (https://blaacpd.org). These pioneering efforts seek to change the landscape of our field by deciphering the genetic architecture of Parkinson's disease in traditionally underserved populations, maximizing both genetic discovery and improving the generalizability of research findings. To further explore these differences, the BLAAC PD study will recruit Black and African American people with Parkinson's disease, as well as healthy subjects, from across the United States. As part of the pilot phase, BLAAC PD launched four sites that are actively recruiting participants: University of Chicago, Rush University, Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States, and University of Alabama at Birmingham. BLAAC PD is now seeking to expand in terms of number of sites and infrastructure and aims to recruit 2000 cases and 2000 control subjects. This research project will generate valuable data that may ultimately reduce existing health inequities across race, ancestry, and geographical region. It is likely that population-specific genomic variation may contribute to altered susceptibility and clinical manifestations of Parkinson's disease in Black and African American individuals. In addition, fine-mapping analyses across this population could be extremely useful to provide insights applicable to a broad disease landscape, given the potential to identify putative functional variants. BLAAC PD will integrate into the broad GP2 initiative, accelerating biological insight and identification of potential drug targets. This pioneering research project will give rise to the generation of critical data in a continuous effort to uncover the molecular complexity underlying Parkinson's disease etiology. Members of the BLAAC PD study drafted and made critical revisions to this article. This work was supported by the Global Parkinson's Disease Genetics Program (GP2) funded by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson's initiative and implemented by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (https://gp2.org). For a complete list of GP2 members, see https://gp2.org. This research was also supported by the Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, and US Department of Health and Human Services project ZO1 AG000949. Members of the BLAAC PD Study Group are: Alyssa O'Grady (The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, New York, NY, USA); Andrew Singleton, PhD (Laboratory of Neuro","journal":"Movement Disorders","year":2022,"id":271665,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":12,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9496,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":937555,"name":"Black and African American Connections to Parkinson's Disease (BLAAC PD) Study Group","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230757,"name":"Sara Bandrés‐Ciga","orcid":"0000-0003-0056-1361","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":9,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:27:39.717534Z","pmid":"35488798","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}