Stroke and Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: We sought to determine whether the recently reported decreased incidence of stroke and atherosclerotic disease in a university hospital-based Parkinson's disease patient population would be demonstrated in our patient population. METHODS: We performed a retrospective case-control review of the last 119 Parkinson's disease patients discharged from the Middleton Veterans Affairs Hospital Neurology Service to study the incidence of ischemic stroke, myocardial ischemia, tobacco use, and other stroke risk factors. Controls were age and sex matched and were randomly taken from 238 non-Parkinson's disease discharges in which stroke or myocardial infarction was not the reason for hospitalization. RESULTS: The cumulative incidences of ischemic stroke, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus were not significantly different between groups. Myocardial infarction, coronary artery disease, tobacco use, atrial fibrillation, cancer, and ethanol abuse were significantly more prevalent in the controls, whereas dementia and congestive heart failure were the only variables studied that were more prevalent in the Parkinson's disease patients. CONCLUSIONS: Our study failed to demonstrate that Parkinson's disease patients from a Veteran population were protected from ischemic stroke.