Allopurinol significantly lowers risk for neurodegenerative diseases

The key findings of the study are:

• Researched used medication data from 2006–2007 and categorized all filled medications based on biological targets and mechanisms of action on those targets.
• They used multinomial logistic regression models and attempted replication in a cohort study, including an active comparator group.
• They found the most consistent inverse association across both studies and all three neurodegenerative diseases for xanthine dehydrogenase/oxidase blockers.
• The gout medication, Allopurinol, represented this.
• Allopurinol lowered risk by 13–34% for each neurodegenerative disease group.
• There was a 23% reduction in neurodegenerative disease in the fifth year of follow-up when comparing allopurinol users to non-users.
• There were parallel associations for a related target-action pair unique to carvedilol.

The Key strengths of the study were restriction to incident cases and application of exposure lagging through our exclusion of medications used in the years immediately before diagnosis with a neurodegenerative disease.

Finally concluding, researchers said that we identified a target-action pair association with a lower risk of developing neurogenerative diseases like PD, AD, and ALS while classifying medications based on specific action on their biological targets.

They wrote that blockade of xanthine dehydrogenase/oxidase or its effects modestly reduced the risk of all three neurodegenerative diseases.

Further reading:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285011