Researchers studied hospital records from a large British database. They identified people with a first case of hepatitis B, hepatitis C, autoimmune hepatitis, chronic active hepatitis and HIV from 1999 to 2011. The compared those results with records of people who were treated for minor conditions such as cataract surgery and bunions. The researchers also examined records to figure out who developed Parkinson’s disease later in life.
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The researchers identified nearly 22,000 people with hepatitis B; 48,000 with hepatitis C; 6,000 with autoimmune hepatitis; 4,000 with chronic active hepatitis; and nearly 20,000 with HIV. They compared the records of the patients to more than six million people who were treated for minor conditions.
The study shows people suffering from hepatitis B were 76 percent more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those suffering from minor conditions. People with hepatitis C were 51 percent more likely to develop the disease.
“It’s possible that the hepatitis virus itself or perhaps the treatment for the infection could play a role in triggering Parkinson’s disease or it’s possible that people who are susceptible to hepatitis infections are also more susceptible to Parkinson’s disease,” said study author Julia Pakpoor, of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “We hope that identifying this relationship may help us to better understand how Parkinson’s disease develops.”
Limitations of the study include not adjusting for lifestyle factors and the fact that the study was focused solely on people who were evaluated at a hospital.
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