Parkinson’s disease : the anti-asthmatic reduce the risk of 30 %

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Published the 04.09.2017 at 14h57

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Asthma medicines are thought to play a protective role against Parkinson’s disease In Science, researchers from the Baylor college of medicine, and Harvard (the United States) have shown that asthmatic patients treated with high doses of salbutamol have a reduced risk in half of developing this neurodegenerative disease.

Parkinson’s disease is caused by the toxic accumulation of a protein called alpha-synuclein. These aggregates lead to the death of dopaminergic neurons responsible for motor skills. Limit the presence of this protein in the brain is thus a track of serious research.
Until now, scientists have tried to develop molecules able to eliminate these aggregates but no drug gives satisfactory results.

The american researchers have therefore opted for another way : to block the production of alpha-synuclein. And to do this, they tested more than 1,100 drugs, vitamins, food supplements already on the market of the neurons grown in the laboratory.

A disease extremely rare

At the conclusion of these tests, 3 molecules are outputs of the lot. Among them, the salbutamol is the molecule the more prescribed. The researchers were then able to study its effect in patients, and this for several years. An in-depth analysis carried out from the registers norwegians with the requirements of more than 4.6 million people on more than a decade.

The first finding : the Parkinson’s disease is extremely rare. A mere 0.1% of patients treated with salbutamol have developed this neurodegenerative disease. The incidence is 0.04 % in the patients who received salbutamol. By comparison, about 1% of people over 65 years of age develop this pathology in France.

After taking into account the level of education and age, researchers have observed that the Norwegians treated with this’antiasthmatique at least once in their lifetime have a risk of developing Parkinson’s disease reduced by one-third. They add that the protection conferred by the drug is associated with dose : the larger it is, the less the patients have risk of suffering from this disease. Thus, the higher doses reduce the risk of 50 %.