Comment by skottk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skottk | Hacker News Reader

Had to start researching this when a family member was recently diagnosed.

Parkinson's has many forms and many causes. There's a big divide between Parkinson's _disease_ (idiopathic Parkinson's) and Parkinsonism from a variety of sources - stroke, drug-induced, and so on. There are also other conditions, like progressive supranuclear palsy, that are considered either to masquerade as Parkinsonism or to constitute another cause of Parkinsonism.

Recommended treatments differ by the root cause of the symptoms. Some of the treatments that are recommended for one form may be contraindicated for other forms, or for different stages. For example, the recommended dopamine agonists are also the primary cause of Parkinson's hallucinations, so you have to trade back some strength and mobility if those start.

Something like 80% of Parkinsonism derives from idiopathic Parkinson's Disease.

Overall, it feels like we're really just getting started on these conditions. For decades, it's been thought to be primarily a motor disorder, but it turns out that there are scads of cognitive symptoms that develop years earlier than motor symptoms.

> Parkinson's has many forms and many causes.

A lot of my family were farmers. I've had close relatives die with severe Parkinsons, primarily those that farmed their whole life. Their theory was that it was really exposure to a lot of toxic farm chemicals. I can imagine Parkinsons turning out to be several different conditions with similar symptoms.

Certain pesticides are confirmed causes of Parkinsons. Don't remember which now, but could look it up.

No, none are "confirmed causes". There are mild associations between the use of certain pesticides and Parkinson's, but much lower than the overall genetic risk factors, and there's always the possibility of confounding factors in the studies.

What's your source, if you don't mind me asking? I ask because some pesticides are well established to be linked to increased risk of parkinson's. Including carbamates (3.5x), organophosphorus (2x) and organoclorine (2x).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33991619/

Maybe. The correlation is weak. If you're looking for a stronger correlation, try obesity.

People who are very overweight or obese in middle age (35-55) are significantly more likely to develop Parkinson's after 60, even if they lose the weight prior to diagnosis. Now this could be a pure lifestyle-correlation, but my spidey sense suggests it's causative, knowing how causative obesity is for SO MANY other degenerative and chronic diseases.

The best advice you can give anyone, at any time, for the prevention of nearly every poor health outcome we have a name for is and always will be: don't get fat; if you're fat, stop being fat.

There are actually a number of different pesticides that are linked to parkinson's. It's especially strong for farmers who get a much larger dose than the people consuming the food - simply type "parkinson's farmer pesticide" into google scholar. One example is Paraquat, which is already banned in numerous countries but not US [1]. Aside from this Parkinson's link being established in farmers who use Paraquat, it's found it rats too.

Another is rotenone [2].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rotenone

In The Netherlands we have A LOT of farmers with parkinsons. Most, if not all cases seem to be related to Roundup/Glyphosate.

Roundup/Glyphosate is such a nasty chemical. Farmers use it in practice regularly for crop desiccation [1] in order to yield more harvest cycles. Why do we still allow it knowing what we know?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

Because cash rules everything around me ("CREAM"), aka dolla dolla bill yall.

Or to put it another way, roundup is made by a large, influential company (Monsanto) and they can pressure regulatory agencies & politicians.

Monsanto is big money, that's why. Just like everything else in our blown out civilization.

I wonder how much of this gets "downstream" to people eating the food produced.

EDIT: https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary.php

The 2023 DIRTY DOZEN

Of the 46 items included in our analysis, these 12 fruits and vegetables were most contaminated with pesticides:

    Strawberries
    Spinach
    Kale, collard and mustard greens
    Peaches
    Pears
    Nectarines
    Apples
    Grapes
    Bell and hot peppers
    Cherries
    Blueberries
    Green beans

The carnivore doesn't sound so idiotic viewed under that lens. The thing about mammals is that they have liver and kidneys, which are remarkably good at filtering toxins. Certainly much better than a plant.

I wonder if the reason many feel better eating only meat is that they avoid pesticides that wreck havoc on their body. I know I do feel like a million bucks after just 10 days, even though it's extremely boring.

On the flip side is bioaccumulation, in which contaminants and toxins are concentrated in organic material, particularly animals, and most especially for predators-of-predators.

The reasons for high mercury levels in tuna, shark, and swordfish is that each of these is both a predator and often eats other predatory species. There are numerous other examples of both species and contaminants, including even natural and even vital substances, e.g., vitamin A toxicity in carnivorous livers.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation>

That's a good point, though we (humans) tend to eat only herbivores and not many carnivores/predators, probably because of that reason. I can't think of any actually, apart from fish.

The reason has far more to do with metabolic efficiency of conversion of biomass into food than with bioaccumulation --- you'll see roughly a 10-fold drop in food production at each trophic level. There are exceptions amongst hunter and trapper cultures, though even there herbivores are generally more abundant than carnivores, and are less treacherous to hunt. You will find ominvores occasionally included in diets: bear, racoon, and members of the rodent family on occasion.

Fish (amongst other sea life) are an exception specifically because humans aren't concerned with that efficiency, and carnivorous fish tend to grow larger which poses efficiency benefits when line- or net-fishing.

Another class is birds, notably fish-eating species, which may be 2nd- or 3rd-order carnivores (carnivores of carnivores, or carnivores of carnivore-eating carnivores).

Personally, I'm much more concerned about the risks to farm workers than risks to the general population.

My grandmother had 10 siblings. They grew up farming and they picked cotton every summer. Of the 11 siblings, I believe 8 of them have parkinsons. They have long thought exposure to whatever pesticides were used on the cotton may have caused the parkinson's late in life. I believe the siblings that don't have parkinsons were those that for whatever reason, had much less exposure to the cotton. Both parents lived pretty long and neither had the disease. There are two sets of twins, one identical, one fraternal. I'm not sure which of those have it. I've long thought that a case study could be made just about that family of 13.

My father, an agricultural engineer who worked with herbicides and pesticides for some 30 years, passed away a few days ago from advanced Parkinson's at the age of 82. Now he wasn't exactly in his teens anymore but his 87 years old brother who was a teacher is in fairly good shape for his age while my father became a ghost of a man (in end stage you cannot even swallow anymore).

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