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Smoking Parkinson's
Those with the proper genetic makeup are less likely to develop
Parkinson's Disease if they had smoked and drank coffee according to a
University of Miami study published in April's Archives of Neurology.
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Doctors take a different look at coffee, cigarettes
9 April 2007 - By Fred Tasker - miamihearld.com
A new Parkinson's study co-written by a researcher at
the University of Miami has found benefits to smoking cigarettes and
drinking coffee. But there are a lot of unknowns.
People who smoke cigarettes and drink coffee are less likely to have
Parkinson's disease. The same can't be said of those who take aspirin.
Those are the conclusions of a new study coauthored by a researcher at
the University of Miami School of Medicine.
Despite the irony of seeming to say something nice about smoking, it's
a perfectly serious study, says William Scott, Ph.D. epidemiologist at
the UM medical school. And he's not suggesting you start, or continue,
smoking.
''Oh, no. Certainly not,'' he says. ``The negative effects of smoking
would greatly outweigh any benefits in terms of Parkinson's disease.
What we hope is to isolate what it is about smoking and design
treatments that will give people the good things without the bad.''
Nor is he telling you to move your personal effects to a table at
Starbucks.
''We don't know whether the differences are from a direct impact of
coffee on Parkinson's or something else that's indirectly linked,'' he
says.
``These things are complicated.''
Parkinson's is a degenerative neurological disease that affects one in
100 people over 60, although 5 to 10 percent of cases occur in people
40 or younger, according to the National Parkinson Foundation.
In the study, done with Duke University, researchers selected 356
people with Parkinson's disease and 317 family members without the
disease to serve as a control group, since they would have similar
genes and live in similar environmental conditions. They found that:
• People with Parkinson's were only about half as likely to ever have
smoked and about one-third as likely to be current smokers, as people
without the disease.
• The more coffee people drank, the less likely they were to have
Parkinson's.
• Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Naproxen and other drugs in the class called
''non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID) medications'' provided no
protection against Parkinson's.
Earlier studies had hinted at cigarette-coffee-aspirin links to
Parkinson's, but this was the first formal one comparing family
members, including siblings, parents, children and cousins, Scott
said.
The researchers do not claim that cigarettes and caffeine act alone in
fighting Parkinson's. They suspect the two factors interact with an
individual's genetic makeup.
''Given the complexity of Parkinson's, these environmental factors
likely do not exert their effects in isolation, thus highlighting the
importance of gene-environment interactions in determining
susceptibility. Smoking and caffeine possibly modify genetic effects
in families with Parkinson's,'' the study says.
Researchers don't know whether nicotine is the compound that protects
against Parkinson's, Scott says. Other researchers have tried treating
the disease directly with nicotine without conclusive effect, he says.
''The problem is there are over 4,000 compounds in cigarette
smoke,'' he says.
One theory: Both caffeine and smoking increase the body's supply of
the ''pleasure hormone'' dopamine. And typically, as people develop
symptoms of Parkinson's disease, they begin to lose the neurons that
produce dopamine.
''There's a connection among all these things,'' Scott says.
A next step is to further explore the interaction of caffeine and
nicotine with an individual's genetic makeup to see who is and isn't
protected from Parkinson's by the two substances, Scott says.
``We're taking these data and overlaying genetic data to see if we
can identify ways in which genes and the environment can work
together to reduce Parkinson's disease.''
The study is in the April issue of Archives of Neurology, a
publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Study subjects were recruited by doctors at Duke University Medical
Center, and Duke researcher Dana B. Hancock was a co-author of the
study. Individuals with Parkinson's were evaluated in clinics.
They and their relatives were then interviewed by telephone about
use of cigarettes, coffee and aspirin. Dosages were recorded in
''pack-years'' for cigarettes, ''cup-years'' for coffee and
''tablet-years'' for aspirin. |
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