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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access published online on September 22, 2007
American Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/aje/kwm260
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2007. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION

Peripheral Inflammatory Biomarkers and Risk of Parkinson's Disease

Honglei Chen1, Eilis J. O'Reilly2, Michael A. Schwarzschild3 and Alberto Ascherio2,4,5

1 Epidemiology Branch, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC
2 Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA
3 Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
4 Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA
5 Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

Correspondence to Dr. Alberto Ascherio, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 (e-mail: aascheri{at}hsph.harvard.edu).

Received for publication April 13, 2007. Accepted for publication August 14, 2007.

Experimental and postmortem evidence indicates a role of neuroinflammation in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. The authors prospectively examined whether plasma concentrations of inflammatory biomarkers assessed before Parkinson's disease diagnosis were predictive of future risk of the disease in a nested case-control study in the United States (1993–2002), including 84 incident cases and 165 matched controls. Blood was collected from patients on average 4.3 years before the diagnosis. After adjustment for potential confounders, higher level of interleukin-6 was associated with a greater risk of Parkinson's disease. Compared with the lowest quintile, the odds ratios were 1.5 for the second, 1.6 for the third, 2.7 for the fourth, and 3.4 for the fifth quintiles (p for trend = 0.03). In contrast, concentrations of other inflammatory biomarkers including C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, and tumor necrosis factor-{alpha} receptors were not related to the risk. These data suggest that men with high plasma concentrations of interleukin-6 have an increased risk of developing Parkinson's disease. However, this finding should be interpreted with caution because of the small sample size and the lack of associations with other biomarkers of inflammation.

biological markers; C-reactive protein; inflammation; interleukin-6; odds ratio; Parkinson disease; tumor necrosis factor-{alpha}

Abbreviations: IL, interleukin; TNF, tumor necrosis factor


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