Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, has started a personal blog and revealed he has a genetic predisposition to Parkinson’s disease.

Brin gave no reason for starting the blog on the Blogger system, which is owned by his company. But in his first post he speaks about his mother’s own experience of Parkinson’s disease and says that he decided to get tested for the likelihood that he would get it.

Brin took a test with the genetic screening service 23andMe after it was set up by his wife. He says the results came back showing he has a mutated gene named G2019S which makes it more likely that he will suffer from the disease later in life.

“Early studies tend to have small samples with various selection biases,” he writes.

“Nonetheless it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson's in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20 per cent to 80 per cent depending on the study and how you measure.”

He says that the discovery is quite encouraging, in that he can take preventative action such as regular exercise and start funding research into the disease.

23toMe was set up by Brin’s wife Anne Wojcicki and has recently started something of a price war among genetic screening companies by cutting its prices by more than 50 percent to US$399.

The company has also started an aggressive promotional campaign, including spit parties at New York fashion week where people spat into test tubes and had their genetic material analysed.

However medical experts have warned that such tests can be highly misleading unless the results are carefully analysed and genetic predispositions are not properly understood.

They also warn that the stress of receiving adverse results may actually exacerbate health issues.

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