Exposure to chemicals and use of drugs contribute to Parkinson's rise - Reprint

Nutrition Health Review, Spring, 2003

(Editor's Note: The articles on this page originally appeared in Nutrition Health Review issue number 60.)

Young drug addicts seem to be joining the ranks of Parkinson's patients. A strange outbreak of Parkinson's symptoms among users of a chemical compound called MPTP appeared less than a decade ago in the San Jose, California, region. The substance had contaminated a batch of heroin that was circulating in the illegal market at that time.

The association between MPTP pollution and parkinsonian symptoms has led investigators to suspect agricultural chemicals to be responsible for the rise in Parkinson's disease among farmers. Many scientists are now working from the assumption that Parkinson's disease can be triggered by environmental toxins.

A study published in Neurology (August 1990) reported that of 300 Kansas farmers questioned, more than half were suffering from Parkinson's disease. Water from wells was also suspected of contributing to the farmers' problems.

Many other investigations have led to the link between chemical exposure and Parkinson's disease. Dr. Caroline Tanner, of Chicago's Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, observed that more than a dozen studies published from 1986 to 1991 revealed association between the disease and rising pesticide sales.

No one has been able to pinpoint these influences on the rise of Parkinson's disease in our time.

Why do some people, although exposed to contaminants, not succumb to the disease? Dr. A. C. Williams, a researcher at the University of Birmingham, England, theorizes that individual susceptibility plays a large part. He suspects that Parkinson patients have defects in liver enzymes that usually serve to detoxify noxious chemicals. A resulting buildup of two neurotoxic sulfur compounds normally discharged (cysteine and thiol) establishes a vulnerability to several brain diseases. Palsy and paralysis are typical of the Parkinson's disease.

The first time that the condition was recognized as a disease in its own right was during the Industrial Revolution in England. Could MPTP be an unnoticed pollutant of that era? (When heat and three common industrial chemicals--alpha-methylstyrene, formaldehyde, and methylamine--come together, they can spontaneously generate MPTP.) So common are these chemicals in industry that MPTP could be an unnoticed and unwanted by-product of manufacturing processes.