At 14:55 -0400 7/26/00, Marjorie wrote:
>According to the Doctor at the Un. of Miami in Miami , Florida,
>he is COMPLETELY convinced its chemicals.
>Unfortunately, the Mortality Rates from the
> the Vital Statistic of the United States Mortality Book, put
>out by the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES,
>PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL,
>NATIONAL CENTER FOR HEALTH STATISTICS, don't back up
>his assumption.
>
>I did a COMPLETE study of about 4 years of deaths which
>listed as cause of death in the Mortality Book.
>. These statistics are 5 years old when the Mortality book
>is published. By the time all these different groups get their statistics
>together, I guess it would take 5 years.
>
>I checked State by State and was unable to come up with any
>State having more mortality in PD deaths than any other states.
>Of course, some States had more deaths from PD because they
>had more people living in the state. But there was no increase
>in Farm States who would use a lot of chemicals.
>
>All those statistics are in the Archives, State by State, year by year,
>and total deaths with PD.
>
>The one thing I did discover is that less African Americans died with
>PD than any other race, and that approximately between 6 & 8 K people
>die in the U.S.A. each year with PD as the cause of death.
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>
