No Association between Parkinson Disease Alleles and the Risk of Melanoma

Background: Recent data showed that melanoma was more common among patients with Parkinson disease than individuals without Parkinson disease and vice versa. It has been hypothesized that these two diseases may share common genetic and environmental risk factors. Methods: We evaluated the association between single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) selected on the basis of recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on Parkinson disease risk and the risk of melanoma using 2,297 melanoma cases and 6,651 controls. Results: The Parkinson disease SNPrs156429 in the chromosome 7p15 region was nominally associated with melanoma risk with P value of 0.04, which was not significant after the Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. No association was observed between the remaining 31 Parkinson disease SNPs and the risk of melanoma. The genetic score based on the number of Parkinson disease risk allele was not associated with melanoma risk [ OR for the highest genetic score quartile (30-35) vs. the lowest (15-20), 1.13, 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.47-2.70]. Conclusion: The Parkinson disease SNPs identified in published GWAS do not seem to play an important role in melanoma development. Impact: The Parkinson disease susceptibility loci discovered by GWAS contribute little to the observed epidemiologic association between the Parkinson disease and melanoma. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 21(1); 243-5. (C)2011 AACR.