A new study suggests that Parkinson’s disease can be linked to 16 types of cancers which include lung cancer, urinary tract cancer, gastrointestinal tract cancer, malignant brain tumor, leukemia or lymphoma, and melanoma among other types of skin cancers.
While it must be pointed out that the list of 16 cancers linked to Parkinson’s disease does not include ovarian cancer, thyroid cancer, and breast cancer – it must be noted that this discovery was only made among East Asian populations – even though earlier studies among Western subjects did not produce the same results.
Utilizing results obtained from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database, the researchers studied 62,023 patients that just had Parkinson’s between 2004 and 2010; and a control group of 124,056 persons that never had the disease was used.
According to Pan-Chyr Yang of the National Taiwan University College of Medicine, Taipei, people with Parkinson’s disease in Taiwan are predisposed to developing cancers based on the results of the study, or rather the link that exists between the two.
Yang further added that based on the fact that this result is peculiar to people in Taiwan or East Asians, it buttresses the relevance of environmental and ethnic vulnerabilities to certain diseases.