Pesticide Exposure as a Risk Factor for Parkinson's Disease

Pesticides And Parkinson Disease

Pesticides are agents or preparations that control, destroy or inhibit pests (Costa., 2013). Pesticides as a class of compounds are practically composed of multiple subclasses that are usually categorized according to their target pests. The major classes of pesticides include: pesticides which target insects (insecticides), fungi and molds (fungicides), weeds (herbicides), and rodents (rodenticides), all may have multiple subclasses of their own depending on chemical identity, physical state, method of application (e.g., fumigants), and origin of derivation (e.g., biopesticides, botanicals, etc.) (Richardson et al., 2019).

In 1990 Koller et al, mentioned for the first time the possible relationship between pesticides and the etiology of PD disease, when they identified rural areas of residence and well water consumption as the two contributing factors to PD. After that, many interesting studies still trying to find out more information about the link between several types of pesticides and PD etiology. In 2018, a meta-analysis reported that long-term exposure to pesticides was related to an increased risk of PD of over 11% (Yan et al., 2018). Also, in 2017 a meta-analysis of case-control studies found that pesticides are combined with a significantly elevated risk of PD with alterations in the PD linked genes (Ahmed et al., 2017). Moreover, in France, PD is even classified as an occupational disease of farmers who apply pesticides (Delamarre and Meissner, 2017). However, Brouwer et al. (2017) reported an elevated risk of Parkinson's disease (PD) associated with 21 pesticides, specifically highlighting paraquat and those used on rotational crops (Brouwer et al., 2017).The aforementioned study by Brouwer et al. (2017) corroborates the findings of Tanner et al. (2011), which indicated a heightened risk of Parkinson's disease (PD) associated with paraquat and rotenone in another case-control study (Tanner et al., 2011). In a recent research by Liu et al., (2020) the involvement of paraquat and rotenone in PD disease has been significantly confirmed (Liu et al., 2020).