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Aug. 18, 2003 — The risk of developing Parkinson's disease (PD) may be lowered by taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs, such as ibuprofen, indomethacin and naproxen) according to an article in the August issue of The Archives of Neurology, a journal of the American Medical Association.
Patients with PD experience a gradual loss of motor function due to cell death in the brain, according to the article. Although the exact cause or causes of PD are unknown, some NSAIDs appear to protect against the development of PD in animals, and regular use of NSAIDs may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease in humans.
Honglei Chen, M.D., Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues investigated whether the use of aspirin or non-aspirin NSAIDs is associated with a decreased risk of PD. The researchers studied 44,057 men participating in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which took place between 1986 and 2000, and 98,845 women who participated in the Nurses' Health Study which took place between 1980 and 1998. The participants had no history of PD, stroke or cancer at the beginning of the studies.
The researchers documented 415 new cases of PD (236 men and 179 women). Regular use of non-aspirin NSAIDs was reported by 6.1 percent of men and 3.7 percent of women. Participants who reported regular use of non-aspirin NSAIDs at the beginning of the study had about a 45 percent lower risk of developing PD than non-regular users. The researchers also found a non-significant trend toward a decrease in risk among participants who took two or more tablets of aspirin per day compared with non-users, but not among those taking smaller amounts of aspirin.
"... the results from our human investigation provide support for the neuroprotective effects of NSAIDs demonstrated by previous experimental findings," the authors write. "Moreover, our results are also consistent with the previous epidemiological support for a protective effect of NSAIDs on the risk of Alzheimer's disease, for which similar biological hypotheses have been proposed."
Editor's Note: This study was supported by research grants from the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., and by a gift from the Kinetics Foundation, Los Altos, Calif.
In an accompanying editorial, Mya Schiess, M.D., of the University of Texas — Houston Medical School, writes that although the study by Chen et al does not follow study participants as they age beyond 75 years, the age groups where some studies place the prevalence of PD at 30 percent or more, "Chen and colleagues provide the best evidence to date for a clinically relevant benefit from NSAID use in preventing PD that meets the validity threshold of consideration for broad clinical application."
"Their data suggest that further refinement of this intervention with specific anti-inflammatory agents and targeted populations may greatly magnify the potential therapeutic benefit," Dr. Schiess writes.