Findings seen in men but not women, based on participants from three U.S. cohorts
THURSDAY, Jan. 14, 2016 (HealthDay News) — For men, but not women, the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease (PD) is lower with higher plasma urate concentrations, according to a study published online Jan. 13 in Neurology.
Xiang Gao, M.D., Ph.D., from Pennsylvania State University in University Park, and colleagues conducted a nested case-control study involving 90,214 participants from three ongoing U.S. cohorts to examine the correlation between higher plasma urate concentration and the risk of developing PD. A total of 388 new PD cases (202 men and 186 women) were identified and matched to 1,267 controls. The authors estimated relative risks after adjustment for covariates, including age, smoking, caffeine intake, and plasma concentrations of cholesterol and ferritin. A meta-analysis was conducted to combine the study data with data from previously published studies.
The researchers found that, comparing extreme quartiles of urate, the multivariate-adjusted relative risks for PD were 0.63 (95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.35 to 1.10; Ptrend = 0.049) in men and 1.04 (95 percent CI, 0.61 to 1.78; Ptrend = 0.44) in women (Pheterogeneity = 0.001). The pooled relative risks comparing extreme quartiles of urate were 0.63 (95 percent CI, 0.42 to 0.95) in men and 0.89 (95 percent CI, 0.57 to 1.40) in women in the meta-analysis.
“We observed that men, but not women, with higher urate concentrations had a lower future risk of developing PD, suggesting that urate could be protective against PD risk or could slow disease progression during the preclinical stage of disease,” the authors write.
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