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Anti-inflammatories
ward off Parkinson's disease Reuters
Health, August 18, 2003 CHICAGO (Reuters) - 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 reported on Monday. The risk of Parkinson's disease was reduced by about 45 percent among adults who regularly took nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) compared to non-users, the Harvard School of Public Health study found. These drugs include ibuprofen, indomethacin and naproxen, which can carry their own risks from long-term use such as liver damage. Individuals who took two or more aspirins daily also got the protective effect from Parkinson's disease, 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 disease, 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, 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 four 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 disease. 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. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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