By Paul Rodgers
It’s the headline dedicated smokers have been waiting for: their disgusting habit is good for them. At least under certain conditions, though this doesn’t mean you’d be wise to reach for a pack of Players – the benefit is far outweighed by the danger of cancer.
Smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that often affects motor skills and speech, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano in Italy. But the link is not a simple one. The researchers hypothesise that a genetic disposition combines with environmental factors to protect smokers from the disease.
Maurizio Facheris, a neurologist at the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Bozen/Bolzano, and his colleagues studied 1228 subjects while working as a research fellow at the Mayo Clinic. “We asked the interviewees to tell us about their relationship with smoking and then compared this data with the presence or absence of variations in the gene CYP2A6, which encodes the enzyme responsible for metabolising nicotine,” said Facheris.
One variant of the gene, when combined with smoking, considerably reduces the risk of Parkinson’s, they found, although it is not clear whether this is due to the presence of the gene variant, or by cotinine, the derivative of nicotine it produces. “If this second hypothesis is confirmed, producing a cotinine-based drug would be a means to reduce exposure to the disease”, said Facheris.
Such a drug could be one of the first to arise from the new field of pharmacogenetics, in which patients will be genetically tested before being given personalised medicines.
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