Aug. 18, 2003 -- Regular use of common pain relievers lowers a person's risk of Parkinson's disease, a new study says. Research continues to build for a protective effect of anti-inflammatory drugs against brain diseases.
The findings come from data collected in two large studies of more than 44,000 men and nearly 100,000 women. The men were 40 to75 years old, and the women were 30 to 55 years old. All were healthy when the study started. The Harvard University report appears in the August issue of Archives of Neurology.
Overall, 415 study participants -- 236 men and 179 women -- developed Parkinson's disease during the study. Parkinson's risk was 45% lower among those who took a common pain reliever known as an anti-inflammatory drug two or more times a week. Examples of anti-inflammatory drugs are ibuprofen, naproxen, indomethacin. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is not an anti-inflammatory drug.
Aspirin is also an anti-inflammatory drug. Study participants who took at least two adult-strength (325 mg) aspirin two or more times a week also showed a lower risk of Parkinson's disease. This was not a significant finding, but since aspirin works much like other anti-inflammatory drugs, researchers say it's probably not a chance finding.
There's good reason to think anti-inflammatory drugs can lower the risk of Parkinson's disease. More and more researchers suspect Parkinson's disease results from ongoing inflammation of the brain.
Inflammation is the body's most common response to infection or injury. Fluids seep into the affected area, making it red and swollen. This attracts immune cells that set off a barrage of chemical signals -- including pain signals.
Alzheimer's disease and Lou Gehrig's disease also involve brain inflammation. Previous studies have suggested that anti-inflammatory drugs help prevent these diseases, too.
The results from human studies support the brain-protecting effects of anti-inflammatory drugs, write Honglei Chen, MD, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health, and colleagues. The results are also consistent with previous studies suggesting a protective effect of anti-inflammatory drugs on the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
In an editorial accompanying the Chen study, University of Texas-Houston researcher Mya Schiess, MD, writes that the study may underestimate the protective effect of anti-inflammatory drugs. Schiess notes that Parkinson's disease is much more common in people more than 75 years old -- an age group not included in the Chen team's data.
"Benefits of even greater magnitude might be demonstrable if this intervention were applied to the same population as it aged beyond 75 years," Schiess writes.
April 01, 2006 - Regular use of anti-inflammatory drugs appears to lower the risk of developing Parkinson's disease, perhaps by protecting brain cells that would otherwise die, researchers said.
The risk of Parkinson's was reduced by about 45 percent among adults who regularly took drugs known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) compared to non-users, the Harvard School of Public Health study said.
These drugs include ibuprofen, indomethacin and naproxen -- which can carry their own risks from long-term use such as liver damage. Those who took two or more aspirin daily also got the protective effect from Parkinson's, which afflicts an estimated 1.5 million Americans, mostly older than 50.
"The results of postmortem studies suggest that inflammation is involved in the development of Parkinson's disease and there is experimental evidence that NSAIDs are protective for the cells that are selectively destroyed," said study author Dr. Honglei Chen of Harvard.
It was not known if taking NSAIDs can benefit people who already have Parkinson's, but the drugs have previously been found to have a protective benefit against Alzheimer’s disease, Chen said. The causes of the two neurological diseases, which commonly strike the elderly, are unknown.
The study, which was published in The Archives of Neurology journal, employed data from two studies involving health workers -- a 14-year study of 44,000 men ending in 1990, and an 18-year nurses study with 98,000 women ending in 1998.
Six percent of the men and 4 percent of the women regularly used NSAIDs. A total of 415 cases of Parkinson's disease were diagnosed.
In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Mya Schiess of the University of Texas suggested that refinements in the study's findings may lead to possible treatments of Parkinson's.
Another report in the same journal projected that the number of Americans afflicted with Alzheimer's disease will triple to 13.2 million by the year 2050 from 4.5 million in 2000, based on an analysis of census data and disease patterns.
The expanding population of those older than 85 are particularly at risk for the mind-robbing disease.
"These estimates ... assume that the age-, race-, and education-specific risk of the disease will remain constant over the next 50 years. The large public health challenge is to make these projections obsolete and irrelevant by discovering routes to the prevention of the illness," wrote study author Denis Evans of Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Dec 16, 2005 - The regular use of ibuprofen may delay or prevent the onset of Parkinson's disease, results of a study published in the December issue of the Annals of Neurology suggest.
Dr. Alberto Ascherio, of Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues investigated the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and any association with Parkinson's disease (PD) risk in 146,948 U.S. men and women enrolled in the Cancer Prevention Study II Nutritional Cohort.
Participants answered a questionnaire in 1992 on four types of commonly used analgesics. A 2001 survey included a question on the lifetime occurrence of PD. A total of 413 incident cases of PD were reported during 1,254,165 person-years of follow-up.
"We found that individuals who regularly used ibuprofen had about a 35% lower risk of developing Parkinson's disease than non-users," Dr. Ascherio said in an interview with Reuters Health.
Specifically, compared to those who did not use NSAIDs, the relative risks were 0.73 for users of fewer than 2 ibuprofen tablets/week, 0.72 for 2 to 6.9 tablets/week, and 0.62 for 1 or more tablets/day (p = 0.03).
No associations were observed between the risk of PD and the use of aspirin, other NSAIDs, or acetaminophen.
"These findings suggest that ibuprofen could contribute to the prevention of Parkinson's disease," Dr. Ascherio said. "Because of the progressive nature of the degenerative process, it is also possible that this drug could be beneficial for individuals with Parkinson's, but this should be tested in randomized clinical trials."
"It would be premature for people with Parkinson's disease to start taking ibuprofen or other anti-inflammatory drugs," Dr. Ascherio cautioned. "Albeit promising, these findings are insufficient to support a change in current therapeutical practice."