'Parkinson's Largely Is a Preventable Disease'

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08/29/2025 19:11

Subject: 'Parkinson's Largely Is a Preventable Disease'

quote

Anonymous

This is on MedPage Today, some paragraphs below
One of the authors of a book discussed, and interviewed for the article, is a co-author of this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11091623/

The image of Parkinson's disease that's been taught -- and likely still is taught -- is that it is a disease that affects older men, and it's principally due to aging and perhaps genetics.

Jana Reed and Sara Whittingham are the new faces of Parkinson's disease. They're both women. They both served in the U.S. military. They both were in Afghanistan. They both were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in their 40s, within a month of each other.

It's a chemical that very few neurologists are taught about, trichloroethylene [TCE]. This chemical and perchloroethylene [PCE], commonly used in dry cleaning, might be the most important causes of Parkinson's.

Researchers have shown increased Parkinson's risk in the Camp Lejeune studyopens in a new tab or window where TCE and PCE contaminated the Marine base in North Carolina. Marines who served there when they were young, in their 20s, had a 70% increased risk of developing Parkinson's 34 years later compared to Marines who served at Camp Pendleton.

TCE is everywhere. It's used to degrease metal and decaffeinate coffee. Ten million Americans worked with it. As for Sara Whittingham -- she may have not directly worked with it, but she was an aircraft maintenance officer, and her job was to oversee the cleaning and degreasing of jet engines. One of the big cleaning agents is trichloroethylene. She was likely inhaling it in the area where she was working.
Parkinson's is one of the fastest-growing brain diseases in the world. If we want to prevent it, we need to first see how many people are getting it and track that over time to see if we're making progress or not. We need to find the areas of the country with high rates, with large numbers of new cases, so we can take targeted actions.

Second, we need to ban some of the most toxic chemicals. The EPA banned TCE and PCE last year. It looks like that ban is going to be put in place. In 2021, they banned chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that used to be found on over half of apples in the United States, but the manufacturer sued and the fate of that is uncertain.

We also need to ban paraquat. Over 50 countries, including China, have banned it, but the United States has not.

What else can we do?

Dorsey: We give 25 suggestions about what individuals can do to perhaps slow the rate of the disease: Wash your produce, preferably your organic produce. Avoid dry cleaners that use perchloroethylene. Use an air purifier if you live in a heavily polluted area. Add a water purifier to your home.

We also give suggestions for communities. Why are we allowing pesticides to be sprayed on kids' playgrounds and schools? Many pesticides are nerve toxins. We should find that socially unacceptable and we should take actions to address that. And golf coursesopens in a new tab or window -- why can't we ask golf courses to use less toxic pesticides?

We need more research to prevent and slow Parkinson's. There are studies that suggest that among people with Parkinson's disease, those exposed to high levels of air pollution are at greater risk for being hospitalized. There are studies that show exercise as a potential way to slow the rate of progression of the disease.