No doubt everyone here remembers the Michael J. Fox commercial from Missouri (and Rush Limbaugh's commentary on it afterwards) from the last election cycle. Thanks to our good friend Rush, I'm pretty sure everyone in the U.S. knows at least a basic amount about Parkinson's disease... and thanks to Michael J. Fox, who appeared all over the TV after Rush's attack on him, we also have at least some idea of how difficult life can be for a Parkinson's patient.
My knowledge of Parkinson's first came from watching my grandmother suffer from it. I was young and she didn't live nearby, so I didn't think too much of it - I just knew it made Grandma shake. Unlike diseases like cancer, it wasn't an immediate fear that Parkinson's would kill her... it just drastically made it harder for her to live.
This week, I came across an article about the correlation between agricultural pesticides and Parkinson's. It seems that the pesticide might not cause Parkinson's per se, but it does increase one's risk of getting it.
The information below comes from an article called "Studies Line Up on Parkinson's and Chemical Poisons Link" by Maggie Fox, April 23, 2007 (Reuters).
Parkinson's - A Short Overview
Parkinson's affects over one million patients in the U.S. It's a degenerative neurological disease that eventually paralyzes patients, characterized by the death of brain cells that make dopamine (a neurotransmitter). In other words, it throws your brain's communication system out of whack. My grandmother, who loved to knit, could no longer easily partake of her hobby once Parkinson's set in because her brain could no longer tell her hands what to do very well.
As you're probably aware of from interviews with Michael J. Fox, there are treatments that can help Parkinson's patients, but there is no cure - that's the big reason that people are so eager to start forging ahead with stem cell research. (As someone who has another neurological problem with some ability to control it but no cure - migraines - I can tell ya that having a chronic neurological disease for years really, really sucks... and if you've got my health insurance, they think it's OK because it's not life-threatening.)
Farm workers and Parkinson's
Farm workers represent a high risk group for developing Parkinson's, and it's a bit of a no-brainer to investigate the agricultural pesticides they come in contact with on the job. Unfortunately, it's hard to link pesticides to many health problems because the health problems take years to develop. (Additionally, I'd bet the companies that make and sell pesticides would rather just not know what harm their products may cause. I can't imagine they'd go out of their way to discover any bad news.)
The good news is that pesticide purchases are documented so that researching farm workers' exposure to specific pesticides is fairly straightforward for those studying the matter. In the case of Parkinson's, it looks like a weedkiller named paraquat and another called dieldrin are the pesticides to pay attention to.
Making the Connection
Two researchers, Dr. Beate Ritz of UCLA and Dr. Caroline Tanner of the Parkinson's Institute, studied at 80,000 people, concluding that farm workers exposed to faced twice to three times the normal risk for developing Parkinson's. Another pesticide, dieldrin, also raised one's risk.
Once the two pesticides were connected to increased risk of developing Parkinson's, the second step was to test the neurological effects of paraquat exposure. Dr. Donato Di Monte at the Parkinson's Institute performed such a test on lab animals, yielding the observation that:
animals exposed to paraquat have a build-up of a protein called alpha-synuclein in their brains. This protein has been linked to Parkinson's in the past. A third piece of the puzzle shows that this buildup of protein kills the same brain cells affected in Parkinson's.
...
Dr. Donato Di Monte of the Parkinson's Institute gave paraquat to laboratory animals and found it caused a buildup of alpha-synuclein in the brain that killed the same neurons affected by people with Parkinson's disease. "This increase in alpha-synuclein in the brain could be the missing link between the exposure to this agent and how this agent causes the disease," Di Monte said in a telephone interview. "Maybe being exposed to paraquat may not be enough to cause the disease but increases the probability the disease may develop," Di Monte said.
Langston and Di Monte said inflammation also could be a factor. "Give an animal a compound that creates a marked inflammation response in the body ... and months later the animal loses cells in same area of the brain that is associated with Parkinson's, " Langston said. "This suggests that systemic inflammation may somehow sensitize the brain."
Multiple concussions, which can cause inflammation in the brain, raise the risk of Parkinson's, Langston said.
Two other groups of people that have a higher-than- average risk of Parkinson's are health workers and teachers. "At first glance that doesn't make sense," Langston said. But both do have something in common --- frequent exposure to viruses.
It could be, Langston and Di Monte said, that if a person is exposed to a pesticide while his or her brain has inflammation, this greatly raises the risk of Parkinson's many years later.
Next Steps & Human Rights
Often we talk about what we should eat to keep ourselves safe and healthy, or to protect the environment. In this case, it's obvious how choosing organics over conventional food is also a human rights issue, since the workers who produce our food are subject to continual exposure to whichever pesticides our government makes legal and we ignore or knowingly consent to using on our food.
For that matter, this also makes a case for buying organic even when the product isn't something you eat (such as cotton). Even though any residual pesticides in cotton would go on you, not in you, a non-organic cotton purchase still provides implicit approval for whatever chemicals those who grew the cotton were exposed to.
It seems as though the research will continue, to learn more about Parkinson's and to hopefully create the change required so less new diagnoses will occur. Once we get rid of that scum Bush (or just override his veto), we can get going on stem cell research, in addition to all other current research to treat and someday cure those who have Parkinson's already.
The last question is one that comes up time and again: What do we do about the two suspected pesticides, paraquat and dieldrin? Are they legal until proven guilty, or can we finally change our policy to "better safe than sorry"? How many more people will develop Parkinson's thanks to these pesticides before a link is proven with enough certainty to make the pesticides illegal?