Common medications like aspirin, ibuprofen, statins and beta blockers appear to slow the progress of Parkinson’s disease, a new study says.

Parkinson’s symptoms took nearly a decade longer to crop up in patients taking these drugs to treat pain, high blood pressure, diabetes or elevated cholesterol levels, researchers reported in the Journal of Neurology.

“The medications we studied have common features that may explain their effect on Parkinson’s disease, including the ability to control inflammation,” senior researcher Dr. Michele Tagliati said in a news release. He is vice chair of neurology and director of the Division of Movement Disorders at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

For the study, researchers evaluated medical data on more than 1,200 Parkinson’s patients treated at Cedars-Sinai between October 2010 and December 2021. Their records included the drugs they were taking on a regular basis.

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive movement disorder that causes people to shake, become stiff or have trouble with their balance and coordination. 

It occurs when the brain cells that create the hormone dopamine die or become impaired, according to the National Institute on Aging.

Researchers found that the Parkinson’s patients experienced an average delay in symptom onset of:

• 8.2 years if they were taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen or aspirin.

• 9.3 years if they were taking statins to lower cholesterol.

• 9.6 years if they were taking beta blockers to treat high blood pressure.

People taking diuretics, calcium channel blockers and diabetic medications also saw Parkinson’s symptoms appear later in life, researchers noted.

On the other hand, smokers and people with a family history of Parkinson’s typically had symptoms appear sooner, results show. Smokers developed Parkinson’s symptoms nearly five years sooner than non-smokers, for example.

“While additional studies are needed to monitor patients over time, this research suggests that the medications studied also help control the cellular stress response and brain inflammation, which may have a prominent role in delaying the development of Parkinson’s disease,” Tagliati said.