Advances in Parkinson’s Disease, 2018, 7, 31-42 http://www.scirp.org/journal/apd ISSN Online: 2169-9720 ISSN Print: 2169-9712 DOI: 10.4236/apd.2018.73004 Aug. 31, 2018 31 Advances in Parkinson’s Disease On Heredity Factors of Parkinson’s Disease: A Parametric and Bayesian Analysis Abolfazl Saghafi 1 , Chris P. Tsokos 2 , Rebecca D. Wooten 3 1 Department of Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, University of the Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2 Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA 3 Department of Mathematics, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL, USA Abstract 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 dis- ease. 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 his- tory 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 Parkin- son’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 mod- eling and analysis with real data to support the conclusions. Keywords Parkinson’s Disease, Heredity, Bayesian Estimation, Maximum Likelihood, Statistical Modelling 1. Introduction Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic and progressive movement disorder, mean- ing that symptoms continue and worsen over time. Nearly one million Ameri- cans are living with Parkinson’s disease and approximately 60,000 are diagnosed with PD each year. This number does not reflect thousands of cases that remain undetected. The cause for the PD is unknown, and although there is presently no cure, there are available treatments such as medication and surgery to manage its symptoms [1]. How to cite this paper: Saghafi, A., Tso- kos, C.P. and Wooten, R.D. (2018) On Heredity Factors of Parkinson’s Disease: A Parametric and Bayesian Analysis. Ad- vances in Parkinson’s Disease, 7, 31-42. https://doi.org/10.4236/apd.2018.73004 Received: August 12, 2018 Accepted: August 28, 2018 Published: August 31, 2018 Copyright © 2018 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access