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According to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, individuals’s immune system helps nudge down the path toward Parkinson’s. Restraining the immune system with drugs could prevent the neurological disorder, which is characterized by tremors, slow movements, stiffness and difficulty walking.
Taking certain classes of immunosuppressant drugs reduces the risk of developing Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative disease, people with several types of autoimmune diseases, including ulcerative colitis, were less likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s than the general population.
Many autoimmune diseases are treated with drugs that dampen immune activity, researchers analyzed Medicare Part D prescription drug data on 48,295 people diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2009 and 52,324 people never diagnosed with Parkinson’s. They identified 26 commonly prescribed immunosuppressant drugs, representing six classes of medications.
They determined which people in the data set had been prescribed any of the drugs a year or more before the date of diagnosis or by a pre-set cutoff date. Prescriptions written in the 12 months before diagnosis or by the cutoff were excluded to rule out any chance that the prescriptions might have been linked to early signs of the disease.
The researchers found that people taking drugs in either of two classes were significantly less likely to develop Parkinson’s than those taking no immunosuppressants. People taking corticosteroids such as prednisone were 20 percent less likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s, while those on inosine monophosphate dehydrogenase (IMDH) inhibitors were about one-third less likely.
When the researchers included specific autoimmune diseases in their analysis, the calculated risks didn’t change, suggesting that the difference was due to use of the drugs, not the underlying diseases they were treating. The findings suggest that tamping down immunity with drugs may keep Parkinson’s disease at bay.
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