What’s the Point?
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a brain disorder that affects movement. It can cause shaking, stiffness, and difficulty with walking, balance, and coordination.
Researchers wanted to see if there’s a link between eating lots of vitamins C, E, and beta-carotene (a nutrient that turns into vitamin A in the body) and getting Parkinson’s disease.
How The Scientists Did It
They searched several online databases for studies that looked at the links between these vitamins and Parkinson’s disease.
They were interested in studies that measured the chances (or risks) of getting Parkinson’s disease for people who ate lots of these vitamins compared to people who didn’t.
They put all the information together and looked at it as a whole using a statistical program called Stata.
What The Researchers Found
The team looked at 13 studies in total. They found that eating a lot of vitamin C doesn’t seem to make a big difference to your risk of getting Parkinson’s disease.
Eating a lot of vitamin E, on the other hand, seems to lower the risk. In fact, people who ate a lot of vitamin E were about 13% less likely to get Parkinson’s disease than people who didn’t eat very much of it.
As for beta-carotene, it’s a bit more complicated. On the whole, people who ate lots of beta-carotene were not much less likely to get Parkinson’s disease than people who didn’t eat much of it.
However, among women, those who ate a lot of beta-carotene were about 22% less likely to get the disease.
What Does It All Mean?
This study shows that eating lots of vitamin E might help protect against Parkinson’s disease.
As for beta-carotene, it might help protect women from the disease, but the researchers are not sure about men. Vitamin C doesn’t seem to have much effect on the risk of Parkinson’s disease.
But, this is what they found in this study, and other studies might find something different. So, scientists need more research to be sure.
The study was published in Nutritional Neuroscience.
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