>Hi Bill,
Unfortunately, all we have which we can study, are the Mortality Rates.
Since there isn't a registry of how many people contact PD each day or year,
in what States, their race , age , occupation, etc.,
then the only thing we can study is death.
I was born and raised in Kansas,
My whole family was, including cousins
galore. NONE of them have PD!!!!! In fact, when I lived in Kansas, which
I haven't for 32 years now, I had never even HEARD of Parkinson's,
let alone knew anyone who had it. I lived in Kansas for 35 years too.
If it was caused from chemicals,
my BIL, who IS a farmer, was born a farmer, and has been a farmer all his
life, would have PD and he doesn't. But he still uses loads of chemicals.
In all those statistics, we were unable to find even a higher incidence of PD
deaths in places where they had chemical plants. There was a huge chemical
producing plant in Cartersville, Ga, where we lived for 2 years, and there was
no larger incidence of deaths in Georgia than in Florida, where there aren't
many factories of any kind, at all.
If it hadn't been for MJF , 99 & 44/100 % of the population of the world
wouldn't have even known, or cared, about PD.
Talk about a silent majority, we really were!!!
just me,
Marjorie
>Marjorie,
>
>My neurologist is of the same opinion as yours, namely that chemical
>insultis probably the root cause of PD. He thought he had it nailed
>for me when I admitted to having lived in Iowa as a youth. Farm
>chemicals! Unfortunately for his theory, I was exclusively a city
>boy (yes Iowa has cities :) And I didn't live there all that long.
>
>And that last sentence holds a key. Trying to find correlations
>between the cause of death (PD) and the state of residence at the
>time of death, or even the state of residence at the time of
>diagnosis will probably not find anything significant. Modern
>Americans are a very mobile lot.
>
>My neuro explained that the onset of my PD was probably a couple of
>decades back. For a long time the brain can increase its sensitivity
>to dopamine to compensate for the declining quantity of the chemical.
>When this compensation reaches its limits the symptoms are first
>noticed.
>
>So to really do what you were trying to do, you would need to
>correlate PD with the location of first (undetectable) loss of
>dopamine. As far as I know no one has that particular statistic.
>
>Another thing that might bear on your statistical research is the
>fact that PD is somewhat older (but not by much) than most of the
>modern chemical pollution that is so troublesome today. What caused
>those early cases, like the ones that Dr. Parkinson described?
>
>Bill
>--
>Bill Innanen <mailto: [log in to unmask]>
> <http://Bill.Innanen.com> & <http://mni.ms>
