Statins might cut Parkinson’s disease risk
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People who use cholesterol-lowering statin drugs may have a lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, a study suggests.
The study, reported in the journal Neurology, found that people who had used statins for at least five years had about one-third the risk of Parkinson’s as non-users did. However, while the findings point to an association between statins and Parkinson’s, they do not prove that the cholesterol drugs help prevent the neurological disorder.
“Although our study findings suggest the very interesting possibility that statins may protect against Parkinson’s disease,” lead investigator Dr. Angelika D. Wahner told Reuters Health, “these findings are preliminary and must be confirmed by additional, well-designed studies.”
For their study, Wahner and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles recruited 312 patients with Parkinson’s disease and 342 adults without the disease. All were residents of three California counties and had a median age of about 70 years.
Overall, 18.7 percent had taken statins at some point, and there was a higher frequency of statin use in healthy adults than in those with Parkinson’s. What’s more, the odds of having Parkinson’s tended to decline as the duration of statin use increased, with the strongest protection seen among people who had taken the drugs for five years or more.
Lower Parkinson’s risks were seen with atorvastatin, simvastatin and lovastatin, but not pravastatin.
“Further inquiry into whether and why statins may play a protective role in Parkinson’s disease is particularly important as our aging population increasingly suffers the burden of Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases,” Wahner said.
For now, she stressed, “it is too early for clinicians to make recommendations based on our findings.”
SOURCE: Neurology, April 15, 2008.
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