Two parasite-fighting drugs linked to lower risk of death
An observational cohort compared 3,876 people exposed to two parasite-fighting drugs with 77,520 matched controls, finding links to lower mortality and fewer age-related conditions.
124,681 participants, independent replication
Limit: Travelers' baseline health and healthcare engagement could explain some of the lower mortality
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
In an observational cohort study, researchers compared 3,876 people exposed to atovaquone-proguanil or mefloquine, drugs against single-celled parasites, with 77,520 matched controls. An earlier case-control screen of medication exposure over 10 years identified these drugs as candidates.
Researchers also examined US health records for 24,498 people exposed to atovaquone-proguanil, 3,400 to mefloquine and 124,681 to nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, each matched to unexposed controls. The last drug also has reported activity against single-celled parasites. Across cohorts, the drugs were associated with lower risk of death from any cause and fewer diagnoses of several age-related conditions, including dementia, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Exposure was also linked to more hearing loss, Sjögren’s syndrome/dry eye and lichen planus. Sjögren’s syndrome is an immune disorder; lichen planus is an inflammatory skin condition.
Why it matters
The authors said the findings support investigating potential links between chronic infections with single-celled parasites and aging-related diseases.
Caveats
These observational comparisons cannot establish causality, and differences between exposed people and controls could account for the associations. The abstract does not report effect sizes or follow-up duration.
From the paper
- Participants
The final cohort included 3,876 treated individuals and 77,520 controls with broadly comparable baseline characteristics ( Table 2 ).
Results, 3.3 Analysis B: validation-exploration cohort in LHS
- Result
… prompting downstream validation of these two antiprotozoal agents: mefloquine (OR 0.32, 95% CI 0.15–0.65, FDR = 0.0001) and atovaquone–proguanil (OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.27–0.69, FDR = 0.0002) ( Supplementary Table S1 ).
3.2 Analysis A results: medications associated with decreased mortality
- Limitation
First, as an observational study, residual confounding cannot be rigorously excluded.
Quoted word for word from the full text on frontiersin.org.
The paper
Tel Aviv University; Ariel University
Frontiers in Pharmacology, Oct 27, 2026, Open access, CC BY
