ABO blood groups and Parkinson's disease.

THE PIONEERING work of Aird, Bentall and Roberts demonstrated a significant excess of blood group A in patients with carcinoma of the stomach. Blood group distribution in diseases of the central nervous system has received little attention. Strang, in the only reported investigation on Parkinson's disease, found an increased incidence of blood group 0 in a series of 450 patients in Sweden. This paper presents a statistical analysis of the ABO, blood group distribution of patients with Parkinson's disease in Northern Ireland. MATERIALS The data are from the hospital records of 187 patients (98 women and 89 men) treated for Parkinson's disease in the Department of Neurological Surgery, Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, and these were considered representative of the disease in the community. Comparison is made with a control series of 27,650, blood donors from the same population.