medwireNews: People with osteoarthritis (OA) have a significantly higher long-term risk for developing Parkinson’s disease (PD) than those without, researchers report.
The study, based on data from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance database in 2002–2005, included 33,360 patients with OA and the same number of age- and sex-matched controls without OA.
In all, 0.77% of patients in the OA group developed PD during an average follow-up of 7.74 years, compared with 0.61% of the control group during an average follow-up of 8.67 years, translating into incidence rates per 1000 person–years of 0.99 and 0.71, respectively, and a hazard ratio (HR) of 1.41 after adjustment for potentially confounding factors.
Shin-Liang Pan (National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei) and co-investigators note that patients with knee or hip OA “appeared to have a higher magnitude of PD risk” relative to controls (adjusted HR=1.55) than patients with non-knee and non-hip OA or those with uncategorized OA (adjusted HRs=1.42 and 1.32, respectively).
“[O]ur findings suggest that clinicians need to be more vigilant about the risk of PD among their OA patients,” write Pan et al in Arthritis Care & Research.
They hypothesize that the association “may be mediated through cytokine-elicited neuroinflammation,” and highlight the need for “[f]urther studies […] to explore the underlying mechanism(s).”
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