Eating peppers may significantly reduce risk of Parkinson’s disease

There's some potentially-good news today for anyone at risk of developing Parkinson's disease. Including vegetables such as tomatoes, potatoes and especially peppers in your diet may substantially reduce your risk of developing this debilitating neurological disorder.

A study out of the University of Washington sought to follow up on findings that smokers, and those exposed to second-hand smoke, may be at lower risk of developing Parkinson's disease. Looking at other plants that contain nicotine, other than tobacco, they investigated whether including these plants in someone's diet could have the same effect.

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"It's possible that people predisposed to Parkinson’s disease simply don't respond well to tobacco smoke and therefore avoid it," said Dr. Susan Searles Nielsen, of the University of Washington's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, according to a press release. "However, if tobacco is actually protective, and if the reason is nicotine as some experimental studies suggest, then our hypothesis was that other plants in the Solanaceae family that contain nicotine might also be protective."

The Solanaceae family of plants includes tobacco, but also vegetables such as potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, tomatillos, chili peppers and bell pepper (all of which contain much less nicotine than tobacco). Searles Nielson and her colleagues studied 490 newly-diagnosed Parkinson's patients between the years 1992 and 2008, along with a control group of another 644 others who were neither related to the Parkinson's patients, nor did they suffer from any neurological disorders.

Their findings showed that eating nicotine-containing vegetables showed a definite reduction in the risk of developing Parkinson's, and that eating peppers showed the most dramatic reduction.

"Eating peppers twice or more per week was consistently associated with at least 30 percent reduced risk of developing Parkinson's disease," said Dr. Searles Nielsen in the UW press release.

Furthermore, according to their research, the more peppers someone ate, the greater the decrease in the risk of developing the disease, and this was seen mostly in people who'd had little to no tobacco use in the past.

The researchers caution that further study is needed to confirm their findings before any definite associations are made. It's also possible that there's another chemical shared between these plants, one that's less toxic than nicotine, that might be just as good, or better at protecting people from developing Parkinson's disease.

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Parkinson's disease is a degenerative neurological disorder that affects an estimated 7 million people, worldwide, including at least 100,000 people in Canada. The disease is caused when cells in the brain that produce the chemical dopamine die. Dopamine has several very important uses in our brain, including the pleasure/reward centres and our emotional responses, but also the voluntary movement of our body. It's this loss of dopamine causes the tremors, muscle stiffness and rigidity, and loss of balance associated with Parkinson's.

The study, published in the Annals of Neurology today, was led by Dr. Searles Nielsen, included Dr. Harvey Checkoway and Dr. Gary Franklin, who are also from the UW Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, and Dr. W.T. Longstreth and Dr. Phillip Swanson from the UW School of Medicine's Department of Neurology.

(Image courtesy: Getty)

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