Alberto Ascherio

A progressive neurological disorder that causes body tremors, Parkinson’s disease affects at least half a million Americans, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. About 50,000 new cases are reported each year, with the number of cases expected to increase as the US population ages.

Parkinson’s disease results when neurons that produce a chemical messenger called dopamine in the brain die or become injured. Loss of dopamine causes neurons to fire without control, making it difficult for patients to direct their movements. There is no cure for the disease.

What causes the neurons that produce dopamine to die is unknown, but the results of animal experiments and postmortem studies among individuals with Parkinson’s disease suggest that inflammation may contribute to the cell deaths. The hypothesis is supported by the observation that anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin protect dopamine-producing neurons in animal models used in Parkinson’s disease research.

Examples of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs include ibuprofen, sold over the counter as Motrin, and naproxen, sold over the counter as Aleve.

Now, Alberto Ascherio, associate professor in the Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology, will be the lead investigator on a two-year grant totaling more than $538,000 for a "Prospective Study of Non-steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs and Risk of Parkinson’s Disease," co-funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Kinetics Foundation.

Michael J. Fox, a well-known TV and movie actor, was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson's disease in 1991. He disclosed his condition in 1998. The foundation named after him was established in 2000.

Ascherio will work with Honglei Chen, research associate at HSPH, and Michael Schwarzschild, a movement disorder specialist at the Massachussetts General Hospital. Other collaborators include epidemiologists Marji McCullough and Jeanne Calle at the American Cancer Society.

In a preliminary study, Ascherio and collaborators found that individuals who regularly took non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs had a 45 percent lower risk of Parkinson’s disease than those who never used the drugs.

The newly funded study will help the researchers test the finding in a larger population.

Ascherio and his fellow researchers will identify individuals who developed Parkinson’s disease among participants in a well-established prospective study by the American Cancer Society, the Cancer Prevention Study II Nutrition Cohort. The cohort includes approximately 160,000 men and women.

The researchers will look at data collected from the cohort from 1992 to 2001, focusing on whether study participants used non-steroidal analgesics, how often they used them, and at what dosage. Then the researchers will look to see which participants developed Parkinson’s disease and will examine whether a risk relation exists.

Confirmation of the preliminary study findings would provide strong evidence that use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs helps prevent Parkinson’s disease and would suggest that regular use of the analgesics could benefit people with Parkinson’s disease by slowing the neurodegenerative process, say the researchers.