People with Parkinson’s disease are at greater risk for melanoma. And vice versa.
When one disease favors another. More patients with Parkinson’s develop melanoma than the general population. The fact intrigues many physicians around the world.
So far, studies have estimated that the risk has doubled. They were wrong, according to the Mayo Clinic (United States). One of its teams publishes, in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a revised assessment of the link between Parkinson’s and skin cancer. A reciprocal link was discovered.
An exonerated drug
People with Parkinson’s disease are four times more likely to develop melanoma compared to those without symptoms. The Mayo Clinic’s analysis relied on a city’s medical database in Minnesota.
From the thousands of records recorded between 1976 and 2013, the researchers extracted information from 974 patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. They have been compared to 2,900 healthy people in this regard. At the same time, an analysis of 1,500 melanoma patients assessed the link to Parkinson’s disease. And the two pathologies are closely linked.
This reciprocal link allows experts at the Mayo Clinic to clear a suspect, levodopa. This drug, which replaces the lack of dopamine, helps reduce motor symptoms in parkinsonian patients. The treatment was suspected of promoting the emergence of melanoma. Which is false, in view of these latest results.
Several tracks
Other avenues should be explored in order to better understand this association between the two diseases. Because they have, a priori, no point in common.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative pathology that results in a deficiency of dopamine in the brain, causing tremors and other disturbances in motor skills. Melanoma is an infrequent skin cancer that easily metastasizes.
Genetics, immune response, environmental exposure… There are many explanatory hypotheses. Providing a firm response may well prove to be crucial. “If we manage to identify the cause of this link between Parkinson’s disease and melanoma, we will be able to better guide patients and their families,” said Lauren Dalvin, who signed this work.
Pending more precise conclusions, healthcare professionals are advised to monitor patients suffering from Parkinson’s more specifically, in order to identify melanoma as early as possible – if it develops.
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