Literature Review of the Contravention Relation between Smoking and Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

Researchers have found that cigarette smoking reduce risk of Parkinson disease (PD) by half for heavy smokers compared to non-smokers persons. Cigarette smoking is confirmed as risk factor for various diseases such as heart disease, lung cancer, and COPD.  However, beneficial effects of cigarettes have been discussed over the years.  It was in the late 1950's studies reported an adverse association between smoking and Parkinson's disease.  More recently, several epidemiological studies supported the negative relation between cigarette smoking and PD. These findings suggested that patients who smoke are 50% less likely to have PD when compared to the non-smoker colleagues.  This indicates that nicotines, which is the addictive substance of cigarette have a "neuroprotective” effect on PD.  That may lead to totally new types of treatments for the disease and potentially reduce the side effects of existing drugs.

In this literature review we summarized the years of studies and researches in PD, and its link to smoking with a clear statement that smoke is still number one killer in our society.  This study is to introduce the relation between PD and smoking to our local researcher, and PD care provider as another field of research for the interested health care, and research centers in Saudi Arabia.

we used key words such as cigarette hazards and benefits, smoking and PD relation, PD.  We used many search engines for example pubmed, google, and others.  The review study will discuss many published papers that reported this unique relation between smoking and PD.  Papers are discussed from older to newer published date.