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NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Women with Parkinson's disease who also take estrogen replacement therapy may significantly reduce their risk of developing the dementia often associated with the disease, according to experts at Columbia University in New York. Many patients with Parkinson's disease also develop a form of dementia that is clinically similar to Alzheimer's disease. Unfortunately, the medications used to treat parkinsonian tremors often cause confusion in patients with dementia, so their Parkinson's symptoms often remain untreated. But if doctors could find a way to prevent or delay the development of dementia in patients with Parkinson's disease, they "...could have greater flexibility in treating motor disorders such as tremors, rigidity, slowness and stiffness, and this may prolong a patient's life," Dr. Karen Marder, a neurologist at Columbia, says in a statement from the journal Neurology. Marder and colleagues studied the effect of estrogen use on the risk of Parkinson's disease-associated dementia in 87 women with Parkinson's disease without dementia, 80 women with Parkinson's disease with dementia, and almost 1,000 nondemented healthy women, all drawn from the same community. They found that estrogen replacement therapy in this group "...did not affect the risk of Parkinson's disease but may have been associated with a lower risk of dementia in women with Parkinson's disease." In fact, in Parkinson's patients who used estrogen replacement therapy, the risk of dementia decreased by more than 75% compared with Parkinson's patients who did not take estrogen replacement therapy. Marder says in a related statement, "Women with Parkinson's disease who reported using estrogen reduced their risk of dementia by almost five times." She speculates, "Larger doses of estrogen could give women greater protection against developing dementia." Since estrogen has been shown to have a protective effect against Alzheimer's disease, the findings indicate that, at least in a subset of patients, Parkinson's disease dementia may in fact be coincident Alzheimer's disease. The authors point out in their report in the April issue of Neurology that their findings are preliminary and should be confirmed in a larger clinical trial. SOURCE: Neurology (1998;50:1141-1143)