US Parkinson's Rates Highest in Whites, Hispanics, and Midwest, Northeast

[The Straight Story]

US Parkinson's Rates Highest in Whites, Hispanics, and Midwest, Northeast

ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2010) — The largest epidemiological study of Parkinson's disease in the United States has found that the disease is more common in the Midwest and the Northeast and is twice as likely to strike whites and Hispanics as blacks and Asians.

The study, based on data from 36 million Medicare recipients, is both the first to produce any significant information on patterns of Parkinson's disease in minorities and to show geographic clusters for the condition.

"Finding clusters in the Midwest and the Northeast is particularly exciting," says lead author Allison Wright Willis, M.D., assistant professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "These are the two regions of the country most involved in metal processing and agriculture, and chemicals used in these fields are the strongest potential environmental risk factors for Parkinson's disease that we've identified so far."

The results appear online in the journal Neuroepidemiology.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127164022.htm

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. My dad had Parkinsons. He grew up in western Kansas

In a small town surrounded by agricultural chemicals.

[DURHAM D]

2. My uncle had Parkinson's. He grew up in central Kansas

and was a farmer surrounded by agricultural chemicals.

[applegrove]

3. My mom has parkinsons'. She did alot of gardening. I hear nitrates can

cause Parkinsons'.

[leftofcool]

6. My dad died with Parkinson's

Doctors say it is the lack of or the depeltion of dopamine in the brain. But no one seems to know why there is a depletion.

[mitchtv]

4. I have it

grew up in NYC, our apartment was above the coal chute until they converted to oil.

[Canuckistanian]

5. Interesting, but it doesn't say much about a potential cause

I'm interested in the difference between urban or rural locations, but the data doesn't show a meaningful difference between the two.

[The Straight Story]

7. Pesticides is one big one, and they are applied more heavily in rural areas (nt)

[Canuckistanian]

8. Right

And the data doesn't support any differences between rural and urban locations.

So pesticides might not be the factor here.

Epidemiologists have long debated whether Parkinson's disease is more prevalent in rural or urban areas, with some studies showing higher rates in cities and some in the countryside. Willis found the condition is more common in urban areas but concluded the comparison between the two rates offered little potential for insight into the disease.

"It's always been an open question as to how to best define the terms 'urban' and 'rural,'" she says. "Urban and rural is defined in many different and relatively arbitrary ways, and we came away convinced by our results that these distinctions have little to do with what is causing the disease."

[The Straight Story]

9. It is ONE of many factors - and here is something more on rural/urban

My X grew up in Bakersfield, CA. When she was a kid the are she lived in could be seen as being rural, and she often road her horse out in the fields where there was a lot of crop dusting. Now it is seen as urban area.

Since Parkinson's can take years to come to fruition in someone then we should be looking more at not how areas are defined now but how they were before.

Those fields she rode her horse in now hold water and are surrounding by tons of homes.

And since most of the people with parkinson's now are in their 50-70's (except for YOPD folks) we should be looking at how the landscape looked decades ago and not now.

[Canuckistanian]

10. That may be the case

But further study is needed. The pesticides in question MAY be in the foods we all eat, rural or urban.

The only way to find out for sure is to compare with cultures who don't use our pesticides.

[SoCalDem]

11. Too bad this will never be definitively "proved", but an onslaught

of "better living through chemistry" is not what the human body "needs"..and after enough time has passed, the susceptible ones will suffer mightily and die:(

the younger and younger onset-ages of many illnesses only proves to (uneducated-ordinary person)->me, that for people born well into the chem-age (the ones susceptible), they will see shortened lifespans and debilitating illnesses.

Boomers and those older that we are, at least had the formative years of our lives lived before plastics & polymers & chem-lawns & frankenfoods crept into our lives, but the younger folks who were born in the 70's have been under "attack" since they were in-utero, and it will take a toll on them...not immediately, but it will eventually catch up to them..

It's got so many levels to it, and comes from everywhere, so there will probably never be any "one thing" that can be blamed..


was it using a cell phone since you were 8 yrs old?
was it sleeping on mattresses oozing fumes from plastics?
or multi-chemical carpets in our homes?
or preservatives in our foods & meds?
or the meds themselves?
or the freaky foods fed to our food-source animals?
or the freaky chemicals washed over our veggies we eat?
or the toxic fumes from the transportation devices we live near, drive in or breathe fumes from?
or from the alphabet-soup chem-concoctions in our shampoos, make-ups & medicinal creams & lotions?

Toxic overload from birth, has to have an effect on people (some people), and there's no way to know in advance if you are one..

[The Straight Story]

12. Yes indeed - was thinking of a an OP about this very subject today

The more I read the more I realize how little we know - and how some things affect each of us in different ways.