Head injury and risk for Parkinson disease: results from a Danish case-control study

OBJECTIVE: To examine the association between head injuries throughout life and the risk for Parkinson disease (PD) in an interview-based case-control study.

METHODS: We identified 1,705 patients diagnosed with PD at 10 neurologic centers in Denmark in 1996-2009 and verified their diagnoses in medical records. Patients were matched to 1,785 controls randomly selected from the Danish Central Population Register on sex and year of birth. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using unconditional logistic regression.

RESULTS: We observed no association between any head injury before first cardinal symptom and PD (OR 1.02; 95% CI 0.88, 1.19). Examination of number of head injuries (1: OR 1.02; 95% CI 0.87, 1.20; ≥2: OR 1.03; 95% CI 0.72, 1.47) or hospitalization for a head injury (OR 0.89; 95% CI 0.70, 1.12) did not show an association with PD. For 954 study subjects with at least one head injury, there was no evidence of an association between loss of consciousness (OR 0.89; 95% CI 0.67, 1.17), duration of loss of consciousness (≤1 minute: OR 0.93; 95% CI 0.58, 1.49; 1-5 minutes: OR 0.74; 95% CI 0.51, 1.08; ≥5 minutes: OR 0.81; 95% CI 0.53, 1.24), or amnesia (OR 1.31; 95% CI 0.88, 1.95) and risk for PD. Application of a lag time of 10 years between head injury and first cardinal symptom resulted in similar risk estimates.

CONCLUSIONS: The results do not support the hypothesis that head injury increases the risk for PD.