Are Antihypertensive Drugs Neuroprotective in Parkinson Disease?

For the past decade, the potential of antihypertensive agents to affect the incidence of Parkinson disease (PD) has been evaluated by various methodologies, yielding a confusing array of conclusions. Now, researchers have conducted a careful case-control study of incident PD diagnosis and its association with various antihypertensives. They identified 3637 patients with incident PD and 3637 well-matched controls from the U.K.-based General Practice Research Database, which contained at least 3 years of data before the index (diagnosis) date for each participant. The authors separately analyzed four major classes of antihypertensive drugs: angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, angiotensin II antagonists, and bet…