Author(s)

Abolfazl Saghafi¹, Chris P. Tsokos², Rebecca D. Wooten³

¹Department of Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, University of the Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
²Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA.
³Department of Mathematics, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL, USA.

Hereditary is one of the key risk factors of the Parkinson’s disease (PD) and children of individuals with the Parkinson’s carry a two-fold risk for the disease. In this article, chance of developing the Parkinson’s disease is estimated for an individual in five types of families. That is, families with negative history of the PD (I), families with positive history where neither one of the parents (II), one of the parents (III-IV), or both parents (V) are diagnosed with the disease. After a sophisticated modeling, Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian Approach are used to estimate the chance of developing the Parkinson’s in the five mentioned family types. It is extremely important knowing such probabilities as the individual can take precautionary measures to defy the odds. While many physicians have provided medical opinions on chance of developing the PD, our study is one of the first to provide statistical modeling and analysis with real data to support the conclusions.

Parkinson’s Disease, Heredity, Bayesian Estimation, Maximum Likelihood, Statistical Modelling

Saghafi, A. , Tsokos, C. and Wooten, R. (2018) On Heredity Factors of Parkinson’s Disease: A Parametric and Bayesian Analysis. Advances in Parkinson's Disease, 7, 31-42. doi: 10.4236/apd.2018.73004.