People Who Survived Heart Attack Have Reduced Risk of Developing Parkinson's Disease, Study Claims

Parkinson's disease has severe impacts on one's neurological health. After discovering the condition, several studies have been carried out to find treatment for the illness. In new research, heart attack was found to have links to Parkinson's disease.

Lesser Risk of Developing Parkinson's Disease After Heart Attack

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According to the latest study on Parkinson's disease, the risk for the illness dropped to 20 percent in patients who experienced a heart attack. The study referred to the data gathered from the Danish health system.

The drop was recorded from a total of 181,994 patients, between 1995 and 2016, and was compared with 909,970 control subjects who matched with gender, age, and the year of the diagnosis.

The study discovered that the chances of developing "parkinsonism" dropped by 28 percent. Parkinsonism is a condition that is somewhat similar to the symptoms of Parkinson's but is not categorized as the disease itself.

Aarhus University Hospital Department of Clinical Epidemiology expert and first author of the study Jens Sundboll said in a press release that the risk of Parkinson's disease in the subjects they observed dropped compared to the general population.

The investigation was the first to identify the unique relationship between Parkinson's disease and heart attack. However, future studies are needed to fill the remaining gaps on how the previous heart attack patients had lesser chances of getting the particular cognitive impairment.

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Relationship Between Heart Attacks and Parkinson's Disease

Heart attacks and Parkinson's disease have their own set of risk factors that the authors believe may explain how they relate to each other.

Risk factors for heart attacks include high cholesterol, smoking, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. All of them were previously linked to a lowered risk of Parkinson's disease. The most similar risk factors between the two conditions are age, physical activeness, and coffee consumption.

Sundboll explained that the results from their study show how cardiac rehabilitation should be modified to prevent neurovascular diseases such as vascular dementia, ischemic stroke, and other types of cardiovascular diseases alongside heart failure and heart attack. The authors hope that the findings would be beneficial for physicians who specialize in treating heart problems, Science Alert reports.

To know more about how a person's heart attack could lessen the chances of Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism, future studies will include a group of diverse subjects, as the population observed from the latest paper was dominated by white.

Smoking and high cholesterol will also be considered for the upcoming investigations, as they were not closely referenced in terms of reduced risk of Parkinson's disease and heart attack.

Sundboll said the findings were surprising, considering that previous studies showed how heart attack increases the risk of neurovascular conditions such as vascular dementia and ischemic stroke (clot-caused stroke).

The results of the study were published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.