Can Statins Prevent Parkinson's Disease?
MONDAY, March 12 (HealthDay News) -- People taking popular cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins may have a slightly lower risk than others of developing Parkinson's disease, new research suggests.
This effect may be even more pronounced among people younger than 60, according to the study published in the March issue of Archives of Neurology.
However, the risk reduction was modest and may have been due to chance, the authors said, noting that more research is warranted, especially because statins can cause adverse side effects.
"There is no clear verdict," said Dr. Stuart Isaacson, director of the Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center of Boca Raton, who was not involved in the study.
"Right now we don't have any good evidence that there is anything we can do to reduce the risk of developing Parkinson's disease, but research is ongoing," added Isaacson,...


from study report itself: Another limitation is that we cannot exclude a possibility of residual confounding because of the observational study design. Among participants in these cohorts, we have previously reported a significant association
between ibuprofen use and lower PD risk.(there were a large number of individuals in these studies who took ibuprofen. madelyn)
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Further, indication bias cannot be excluded because an elevated level
of cholesterol has been found to be associated with lower
PD risk in some but not all previous prospective studies, as reviewed elsewhere.
3"...However, our results should be interpreted with caution because only
approximately 70% of users of cholesterol-lowering drugs
at baseline were actual statin users. Further, the results
were only marginally significant and could be due to
chance. In contrast with use of ibuprofen, which has been
consistently found to be inversely associated with PD risk
in these cohorts (pooled RR = 0.62; 95% CI, 0.42-0.93)
as well as in other longitudinal studies,
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the overall epidemiological evidence relating statin use to PD risk remains unconvincing. Given the potential adverse effects of statins, further prospective observational studies
are needed to explore the potential effects of different subtypes of statins on risk of PD and other neurodegenerative diseases."

http://www.topnews.in/health/statin-...-s-risk-215260