New research raises the question of whether living within a few miles of a golf course increases your risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Brittany Krzyzanowski, an assistant professor at Barrow Neurological Institute, worked on the study and says prior research focused on whether living near a golf course increased cancer risks — the main connection between these two areas of study is pesticides.
Krzyzanowski says there’s a well-known link between pesticides and Parkinson’s disease, but little research into the relationship between the neurological disease and golf courses.
The data that exists has found, among other things, a pattern of pesticide-related cancers in golf course superintendents. Krzyzanowski says these new results, which were published in JAMA seem to show some similarities with those previous studies.
Krzyzanowski joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
BRITTANY KRZYZANOWSKI: Yeah, so that's, that is that is the case. And, you know, if I could go a little further into what inspired this work beyond those prior studies, there's been tons of other studies that looked into the ability of pesticides to leach into groundwater supplies.
And then there was also this incident in Cape Cod where the groundwater under four different golf courses was contaminated with pesticides, with one of the pesticides being present in the drinking water at levels more than 200 times greater than the health guidance level.
MARK BRODIE: How strong is the relationship? I mean, can we say for sure that pesticides used on golf courses potentially leaking into groundwater is the cause of some number of these people to end up developing Parkinson's?
KRZYZANOWSKI: Absolutely not. At this point, this study, it's important to remind everybody who's reading this study that one of the major limitations is that we didn't have data on pesticide usage. We didn't take water samples or samples from the individuals. So we're limited in how we can interpret these results.
BRODIE: So what do you then take them to mean? Or maybe more to the point, what would you like to be looking at next to really get a sense of what's going on here?
KRZYZANOWSKI: I mean, I guess I would say I, I would like to, you know, remind everyone about the strengths of the study. Perhaps the strengths of the studies would be that we were using this population-based data set for the study area, and we use address level data. We also had accurate data on golf course locations, and we could accurately determine the source of everyone's drinking water, whether that be city water or well water.
So we did have a strong study in those regards, with the major limitation being that we didn't have data on pesticide usage in terms of, you know, what we want to do for next steps. We hope to replicate this study in the future. Nationwide. And so that there would be some challenges there. In particular, we need to draw the boundaries around tens of thousands of golf courses nationwide in order to have these precise distance measures. But we have a good start on that so far.
BRODIE: And just to be clear, am I right that this study did not look at the Phoenix area, which of course has a lot of golf courses in it?
KRZYZANOWSKI: That's correct. So this study was limited to a region in Minnesota and Wisconsin. And it's important to note that this region has hot and humid summers where golf courses might have applied pesticides with more frequency compared to other geographic regions. So, you know, our results might not generalize to other areas.
In particular, the desert southwest where Phoenix is, prior studies have suggested that these drier climates apply less pesticides to golf courses. Compared to the hot and humid parts of the Midwest.
BRODIE: Do golf courses tend to use different kinds of pesticides than, for example, parks, which also have, you know, lots of grass or sports stadiums or other places like that that also have a lot of grass that they'd like to keep green.
KRZYZANOWSKI: I'm not comfortable with answering that. But I do know that there's a lot of overlap between the pesticide use and golf courses, the pesticides used in agriculture and in, you know, sports fields.
BRODIE: So does that mean that it maybe wouldn't shock you if you found similar kinds of results for people who maybe live within a certain distance from a stadium or from a farm or something like that.
KRZYZANOWSKI: Yeah, so in terms of the farm, we've done previous research on agricultural farms, and we found an association between, you know, how much farm fields, the density of farm fields in your neighborhood and your risk of Parkinson's. And that was particularly high in the Great Plains region of the United States. In terms of, did you say sports fields?
BRODIE: Yeah, like, maybe like a baseball stadium or a soccer field or something like that.
KRZYZANOWSKI: There are some kind of anecdotal reports on that. I can't go into it, though, but I know some people who have written on the potential for that.
BRODIE: So given, as you say, sort of the strengths and some of the, you know, information that maybe we don't have based on this study, what to you should people reading this take away from it?
KRZYZANOWSKI: I think that it's important to, you know, to realize that, yes, this is an observational study. So we cannot make causal conclusions from our results. But this is a good first step towards understanding the potential for environmental toxins, applied to the places that we visit, the places that are around us, golf courses, for example, that these may have the potential to impact our health.
BRODIE: And how much do we understand the relationship between pesticides in general and Parkinson's? Like, do we know why there might be a relationship there?
KRZYZANOWSKI: Yeah, so there's tons of research on the link between pesticides and Parkinson's, including animal models, epidemiological models and occupational studies as well. So it's generally widely accepted that pesticides are linked to Parkinson's disease risk.
I think it's also important to note that Parkinson's disease develops many decades after exposure. So our study is interested in estimating exposure that occurred many years ago. So, if pesticides are involved in our association, they would have been the ones that were sprayed a long time ago. And that might be different from what's being sprayed today.
