Is there an association between the level of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and idiopathic Parkinson's disease? A comparison of Parkinson's disease patients, disease controls and healthy individuals.

BACKGROUND

High-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) is a sensitive systemic marker of inflammation, and increased levels of hs-CRP are associated with inflammatory reactions. Microglia-mediated neuroinflammation has been hypothesized to play an important role in the pathogenesis of idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the clinical value of hs-CRP in PD is poorly defined. Therefore, we conducted this study to investigate the clinical value of hs-CRP in patients with PD.

METHODS

We examined 212 patients with de novo PD, 253 patients with acute ischemic cerebrovascular disease and 119 healthy subjects and investigated the differences in hs-CRP among these 3 groups. The PD group was classified into 4 subgroups according to the Hoehn and Yahr stage to investigate the relationship between hs-CRP and symptom severity.

RESULTS

There was no significant difference in the hs-CRP value between the PD and the ischemic cerebrovascular disease groups, but the subjects in the 2 disease groups demonstrated higher hs-CRP levels than those in the normal control group. A post-hoc analysis of the 4 PD subgroups showed no significant differences in hs-CRP values. In addition, this study demonstrated that the odds ratio of the PD group by hs-CRP was 2.037 (95% CI 1.180-3.517; p = 0.011).

CONCLUSION

We suggest that our results could support the hypothesis that neuroinflammation contributed to the pathogenesis of PD and cautiously assume that elevated hs-CRP might have a clinical value as a risk factor for PD.