A mystery all too familiar for Steve.
Spoiler: it’s the pesticides. Researchers found that those living within a mile of golf courses have 126 percent higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease than those who live more than six miles away, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Areas that shared drinking water supplies with water used near golf courses were the most greatly impacted, the study shows. Researchers believe this shows that the pesticides used on golf courses could contribute to the amount of Parkinson’s cases.“The odds of PD were relatively constant within close proximity to a golf course and decreased linearly as distance increased; individuals living farther from a golf course had reduced odds of PD, decreasing relative to the distance from the nearest golf course,” the study explained.Previous studies have already linked chemicals found in pesticides including paraquat and rotenone to neurodegeneration, according to the study.
“This isn’t about golf,” said Dr. Michael Okun, national medical adviser for the Parkinson’s Foundation. “It’s about pesticides, environmental exposures, and preventable risks hiding in plain sight.”
For almost all of their 68 years, two twins have lived no more than half a mile apart. They have been exposed to the same air, the same well water, the same dusty farm chores, the same pesticides. They built their homes a five-minute walk from each other, on two plots of their father’s 132-acre farm in eastern Pennsylvania. And since 1971 they have worked in the same office, their desks pushed together, at a graphic design firm they co-own.
Jack has Parkinson’s disease, and his twin brother Jeff does not.The existence of a pair of twins with identical DNA and nearly identical environments in which only one is sick—that’s a researcher’s bonanza. Whatever difference can be untangled in the twins’ physiology probably relates directly to the disease and its origins. The genome can be held constant; environmental toxins and other exposures can be held constant; what remains, researchers are left to think, might be an odd shift in a particular neural pathway that has a relevant function all its own.