Parkinson's Linked to Pesticides, Head Trauma

Mar. 23 -- WEDNESDAY, May 30 (HealthDay News) -- Pesticides and head injury can both bump up risks for Parkinson's disease, European researchers report.

Moreover, odds for the illness increase as exposure to these brain insults rises, the report found.

For example, "Those who were heavily exposed to pesticides had a 41 percent increased risk of developing Parkinson's disease, and those with lower exposure had a 13 percent increased risk," said lead researcher Dr. Finlay Dick, from the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Aberdeen University Medical School, Aberdeen, U.K.

In addition, people who were knocked unconscious even once had a 35 percent increased risk of developing Parkinson's, Dick said.

That finding has real implications for sports such as boxing, the researchers said. In fact, professional boxing legend Muhammad Ali, 65, now suffers from advanced Parkinson's disease.

The findings are published in the May 30 online edition of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

According to the National Parkinson Foundation, 1.5 million Americans currently have the degenerative illness, which strikes men and women in roughly equal numbers, usually after the age of 65.

In the study, Dick's team collected data on 959 people with Parkinson's or Parkinson's-like syndromes and almost 2,000 people without the condition. All the people were questioned about their exposure to pesticides as well as iron, copper and manganese. They were also asked if they had ever having been knocked unconscious or had a family history of Parkinson's disease.

The team found that people who had been exposed to low levels of pesticides were 13 percent more likely to have Parkinson's compared to people who had never been exposed. And people exposed to high levels of pesticides were 41 percent more likely to develop the condition.

Dick's group also found that Parkinson's disease occurred 35 percent more often in people who had been knocked unconscious once compared with those who had never been knocked out, and more than two-and-a-half times more frequently in people who had been knocked out more often.