Cigarette Smoking May Reduce Parkinson’s Risk

By Steven Edwards

Complementing today’s Wired story on the pharmaceutical benefits of nicotine, a study published in July’s Archives of Neurology reports that smoking may reduce the risk of developing, or delay the onset of, Parkinson’s disease. Smaller benefits were detected in former smokers.

The authors found that smokers were less likely to get Parkinson’s, and those who smoked more seemed to have greater protection. These findings indicate that smoking may delay rather than prevent the onset of Parkinson’s, but that would have to be confirmed by a larger study.

“Current smokers and those who had continued to smoke to within five years of Parkinson’s disease diagnosis exhibited the lowest risk, [but] a decrease in risk [of] 13 to 32 per cent was also observed in those who had quit smoking up to 25 years prior,” said Dr Beate Ritz, of the UCLA School of Public Health in Los Angeles, and her co-authors.

Reductions were not seen in Hispanic or African-American patients, but this didn’t discourage the researchers. They suggest that a substance in cigarette smoke may protect dopaminergic neurons, whose loss causes the tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease.

This entry was posted on July 13, 2007 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Forum, Parkinson's Disease Categories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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