Cancer in Parkinson Disease: an approximation to the main risk factors.

BACKGROUND Many evidences suggest a pathological link between neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. In fact, several epidemiologic studies indicate a a decreased incidence of most cancer types in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and some PD genes are involved in cancer networks. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to assess the influence of several factors in the risk of cancer in a cohort of 753 PD patients and to study how these variables interact with each other. METHODS We analyzed the effect of gender, tobacco, alcohol, type of PD (genetic (gPD) or idiopathic PD (iPD)) and two genetic variants, previouly associated with cancer, rs5848- GRN, rs1042522- TP53. RESULTS A higher age at PD onset was observed in patients that develop cancer before PD (p<0.001). Alcohol consumption was a risk factor to develop cancer in PD patients (p=0.011) while smoking was not a cancer risk factor in our cohort(p=0.098). Among the genetic factors, the genotype TT GRN-rs5848 was statistically more frequent in PD patients without cancer (p=0.05). CONCLUSIONS Our study identified several factors, genetic and non-genetic, which contribute to the risk for cancer in PD.