Study Rationale: Parkinson’s disease is becoming more and more common over time, but we don’t know why. We will assess how much five key risk factors increase the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease using evidence from studies conducted all over the world. With this information, we will better understand what contributes to rising cases of Parkinson’s, and what we can do to combat this trend.
Hypothesis: Evidence suggests air pollution, trichloroethylene chemical exposure, pesticides, high blood sugar and low exercise all contribute to more cases of Parkinson’s disease – which of these risk factors has the greatest impact on Parkinson’s disease risk, and how good is the evidence for each?
Study Design: Many studies have looked at the impact of a single risk factor in a single location on Parkinson’s disease. For five key risk factors for Parkinson’s disease, we will use methods to combine information from all of these studies to get a better picture of whether and how much each risk factor increases the likelihood of Parkinson’s disease. With our methods, we can give each risk factor a “star rating” from 1 (very little evidence of association) to 5 (very strong evidence of association) and rank the strength of the evidence between the different risk factors.
Impact on Diagnosis/Treatment of Parkinson’s disease: Prevention is even better than intervention. If we can determine what aspects of lifestyle or the environment cause Parkinson’s disease to occur, we can come up with interventions for these risk factors to decrease the number of people who get Parkinson’s disease in the first place.
Next Steps for Development: Once we have assessed how much different risk factors increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease, we will be able to determine how much health loss from Parkinson’s disease could be avoided if we removed these risk factors. This will inform policy makers which risk factor(s) to target for future interventions.