MI tied to reduced risk for Parkinson’s disease
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One-year survivors of MI experienced decreased risk for developing Parkinson’s disease and secondary Parkinsonism compared with the general population, researchers reported.
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the association between MI and reduced risk for Parkinson’s disease may be indicative of an inverse relationship between Parkinson’s disease and CV risk factors.
“Parkinson’s disease is primarily a neurodegenerative disease, whereas Parkinsonism has several underlying causes besides primary neurodegenerative processes, including a variety of vascular mechanisms. These may include lacunar infarcts and other vascular insults encompassing the substantia nigra, cerebral white matter and other cerebral structures,” Jens Sundbøll, MD, PhD, from the departments of clinical epidemiology and cardiology at the Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark, and colleagues wrote. “We therefore examined the long-term risk of Parkinson’s disease and secondary Parkinsonism following first-time MI and the impact of common MI treatments and complications.”
Utilizing Danish medical registries, researchers compared the incidence of Parkinson’s disease and secondary Parkinsonism at 1 year among patients with a first-time MI diagnosis from 1995 to 2016 and a sex- , age- and calendar year-matched general population cohort without MI.
MI and subsequent Parkinson disease risk
A total of 181,994 patients were included in the MI cohort (median age at MI diagnosis, 71 years; 62% men) and 909,970 matches were included from the general population.
After 21 years of follow-up, researchers reported that the cumulative incidence of Parkinson’s disease was 0.9% in the MI cohort and the incidence of secondary Parkinsonism was 0.1% compared with 1.25% and 0.14%, respectively, in the general population.
According to the study, occurrence of MI was associated with lower risk for both Parkinson’s disease (adjusted HR = 0.8; 95% CI, 0.73-0.87) and secondary Parkinsonism (aHR = 0.72; 95% CI, 0.54-0.94).
MI subgroup analyses
Sundbøll and colleagues observed no impact of procedures and complications after MI on subsequent risk for Parkinson disease or secondary Parkinsonism and no difference when patients and the general population were stratified by sex.
Researchers noted that the reduced risk for Parkinson’s disease was more pronounced among older patients.
According to the study, these findings indicate that an unmeasured confounder would need to be strongly associated with both MI and Parkinson’s disease to explain these results. Potential remains for a confounder with a moderate to large effect, such as smoking, to explain the results of the present analysis.
“There are very few diseases in this world in which smoking decreases risk: Parkinson’s disease is one, and ulcerative colitis is another. Smoking increases the risk of the most common diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease and pulmonary disease and is definitely not good for your health,” Sundbøll said in a press release.
Researchers reported no effect of cardiac and noncardiac comorbidity, Charlson Comorbidity Index or use of drugs associated with extrapyramidal adverse effects mimicking Parkinson’s disease on the observed association.
Moreover, the type of MI experienced by individuals in the MI cohort did not substantially impact the results.
“For physicians treating patients following a heart attack, these results indicate that cardiac rehabilitation should be focused on preventing ischemic stroke, vascular dementia and other cardiovascular diseases such as a new heart attack and heart failure, since the risk of Parkinson’s appears to be decreased in these patients, in comparison to the general population,” Sundbøll said in the release.
Reference:
- Heart attack survivors may be less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease. newsroom.heart.org/news/heart-attack-survivors-may-be-less-likely-to-develop-parkinsons-disease. Published Feb. 16, 2022. Accessed Feb. 16, 2022.
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