Research suggests a possible link between chronic infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) and the development of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and secondary Parkinsonism (PKM). We investigated the impact of antiviral treatment status (untreated, interferon [IFN] treated, direct acting antiviral [DAA] treated) and outcome (treatment failure [TF] or sustained virological response [SVR] regimens) on risk of PD/PKM among patients with HCV.
Using data from the Chronic Hepatitis Cohort Study (CHeCS), we applied a discrete time-to-event approach with PD/PKM as the outcome. We performed univariate followed by a multivariable modeling that used time-varying covariates, propensity scores to adjust for potential treatment selection bias, and death as a competing risk.
Among 17,199 confirmed HCV patients, we observed 54 incident cases of PD/PKM during a mean follow-up period of 17 years; 3753 patients died during follow-up. There was no significant association between treatment status/ outcome and risk of PD/PKM. Type 2 diabetes tripled risk (hazard ratio [HR] 3.05; 95%CI 1.75-5.32; p30 was associated with roughly 50% lower risk of PD/PKM than BMI <25 (HR 0.43; 0.22-0.84; p=0.0138).
After adjustment for treatment selection bias, we did not observe a significant association between HCV patients’ antiviral treatment status/outcome on risk of PD/PKM. Several clinical risk factors-diabetes, cirrhosis, and BMI-were associated with PD/PKM.

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