AAN 2024: Higher Rates of Pesticide Use Increase Parkinson’s Disease Risk
Findings specifically link lindane, simazine, and atrazine use to Parkinson’s disease risk in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions
TUESDAY, April 23, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Higher application rates of three pesticides in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions are associated with increased Parkinson’s disease (PD) risk, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, held from April 13 to 18 in Denver.
Alexia Lapadat, from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and colleagues used geographic methods to examine the rates of PD across the United States for 21.5 million Medicare beneficiaries (aged 67 years or older in 2009) and compared those rates to regional levels of pesticide and herbicide use for 465 pesticides obtained from the U.S. Geological Survey.
The researchers found that 14 pesticides were strongly associated with PD in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains region, which included parts of Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. The strongest associations with PD were seen for simazine, lindane, and atrazine. For counties with the highest decile of simazine application, there was a 36 percent greater relative risk for PD versus counties with the lowest decile of exposure. For counties in the top decile of application of atrazine and lindane versus the lowest decile, relative risks were 31 percent and 25 percent higher, respectively. This translates to 475 new PD cases developed per every 100,000 people in counties with highest exposure to atrazine versus 398 cases in the counties with the lowest exposure. For all three of these pesticides, there was a modest dose-response relationship with PD risk.
“We are beginning to move away from our county-level work toward doing more high-resolution, or person-level, studies,” coauthor Brittany Krzyzanowski, Ph.D., from the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, told Elsevier’s PracticeUpdate. “Although we cannot make causal conclusions from our study, there is considerable evidence to suggest that exposure to pesticides increases the risk of PD. Some pesticides have been banned in the past based on evidence of negative health effects. We are currently conducting studies using higher-resolution exposure data to better inform public health policy in the future.”
One author disclosed financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
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