Reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease associated with lower body mass index and heavy leisure-time physical activity

Abstract

The risk factors for Parkinson's disease (PD) are not well established. We therefore examined the prediction of various lifestyle factors on the incidence of PD in a cohort drawn from the Finnish Mobile Clinic Health Examination Survey, conducted in 1973-1976. The study population comprised 6,715 men and women aged 50-79 years and free of PD at the baseline. All of the subjects completed a baseline health examination (including height and weight measurements) and a questionnaire providing information on leisure-time physical activity, smoking, and alcohol consumption. During a 22-year follow-up, 101 incident cases of PD occurred. The statistical analyses were based on Cox's model including age, sex, education, community density, occupation, coffee consumption, body mass index (BMI), leisure-time physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption as independent variables. At first, BMI was not associated with PD risk, but after exclusion of the first 15 years of follow-up, an elevated risk appeared at higher BMI levels (P for trend 0.02). Furthermore, subjects with heavy leisure-time physical activity had a lower PD risk than those with no activity [relative risk (RR) 0.27, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.08-0.90]. In variance with findings for other chronic diseases, current smokers had a lower PD risk than those who had never smoked (RR 0.23, 95 % CI 0.08-0.67), and individuals with moderate alcohol intake (at the level of <5 g/day) had an elevated PD risk compared to non-drinkers. The results support the hypothesis that lifestyle factors predict the occurrence of Parkinson's disease, but more research is needed.

Prospective study on the components of metabolic syndrome and the incidence of Parkinson's disease

“…The shorter follow-up time was applied due to the suspicion that the prediction of single exposure measurement weakens in time. This Table 2 Baseline characteristics a suggestive result is in line with the hypothesis that obesity could be a risk factor for PD, supported by three prospective studies indicating increased PD risk for individuals with high BMI [11,13] or increased triceps skinfold thickness [9]. However, the epidemiologic literature on the association between BMI and PD risk is inconsistent [8,10,12].…”

“…This inconsistency could be explained by the preclinical disease stage of PD masking the associations, since PD patients tend to lose weight during the disease progression, starting already several years before the clinical diagnosis [31]. Studies excluding the first 3e5 years of follow-up did not found an association between BMI and PD risk [8,10,12], whereas a recent finding from another Finnish cohort suggested an inverse association after exclusion of the first 15 years of follow-up [13]. The mechanism behind the association between obesity and the PD risk is poorly understood, but obese persons were found to have lower dopamine receptor availability than non-obese controls [32], which could predispose them to higher PD risk.…”

Lifetime occupational and leisure time physical activity and risk of Parkinson's disease

“…Our study with nearly 360 PD cases enrolled a substantially larger number of PD affected participants than most previous studies [10, 11, 24, 30]. Moreover, ours is the only epidemiologic population-based study in which movement disorder specialists examined 71% of patients multiple times over almost a decade to confirm a diagnosis of idiopathic PD, minimizing disease misclassification potential.…”

“…However, many of these cohort studies relied on self-report of physical activity levels or recorded activity patterns at baseline only [11, 12], accrued small numbers of incident PD cases or followed populations with a life-style different from the general population [10, 11]. In addition, most previous studies focused on leisure time activities while only two considered work related activities [8, 10].…”

Exercise preconditioning improves traumatic brain injury outcomes

“…Humans participating in regular exercise programs exhibit brain volume increases in the supplementary motor area, right inferior frontal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, anterior cingulate, and hippocampus (Colcombe et al, 2006; Erickson et al, 2011). Being more physically active is also associated with reduced Alzheimer's (Lautenschlager et al, 2008) and Parkinson's (Saaksjarvi et al, 2014) disease risk. These are important findings because TBI is a risk factor for the accelerated onset and development of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (Jafari et al, 2013; Sivanandam and Thakur, 2012).…”