New study confirms link between Pesticide use and Parkinson's

A new study has shown strong link between the Parkinson's disease and exposure to pesticides in patients with neurological disease. The study found that long-time exposure to pesticides significantly increases the risk of Parkinson's disease, a common neurological disorder affecting about 1 million people in the USA.

Parkinson is a movement disorder that makes limbs rigid and produces body tremors. The highly dangerous disease can take away a person's ability to move by causing tremors, stiffness, shuffled walk, muffled speech. Drugs may help keep the symptoms quiet for some span of time, but not completely, and not always over the long term. The disease is thought to be due to an interaction between genetic and environmental factors.

The latest study, published online in the open-access journal BMC Neurology, studied 319 Parkinson's patients and 296 of their relatives and spouses to determine the possible link between pesticide use and Parkinson's disease.

A tem of researchers from Duke University Medical Center (Durham, NC) and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine Morris K. Udall Parkinson Disease Research Center of Excellence (Miami, FL, USA), interviewed the study subjects to get details about whether they ever were exposed to pesticides, lived or worked on a farm, or drank water from wells.

After analyzing the data, the researchers detected the strongest ties to the use of herbicides and insecticides, such as organochlorides and organophosphates. The Parkinson's patients exposed to pesticides 1.61 times more likely to develop the disease.

Although several other studies have supported pesticides as a risk factor for Parkinson's, but biological evidence is currently not sufficient to conclude that pesticide exposure causes PD, a progressive nervous disease occurring most often after the age of 50, said the study author Dana Hancock from the Duke University Medical Centre in Durham.

“Previous studies have shown that individuals with Parkinson's disease are over twice as likely to report being exposed to pesticides as unaffected individuals, but few studies have looked at this association in people from the same family or have assessed associations between specific classes of pesticides and Parkinson's disease,” Hancock added.

First noted by British physician James Parkinson in the early 1800s, Parkinson’s disease is an incurable progressive movement disorder that occurs when the muscle movement controlling cells of the brain stop functioning for unknown reasons (neurons that make a chemical called dopamine which sends signals for movement coordination die or do not work properly).

The person’s ability to control his movement initiation, speed and smoothness is affected. They may have trouble walking, talking or doing simple tasks. They may also have problems such as depression, sleep problems or trouble chewing, swallowing or speaking.

Also called Paralysis agitans or Shaking palsy, the disease is caused when brain cells called substantia nigra that produce dopamine, one of the movement control centers of the brain, die off.