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Here's one of a few abstracts from Medline/Toxline discussing research into
the potential link between pesticide exposure and Parkinson's Disease.  More
will follow.
Wendy Tebay
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AU  - WANG F-L
AU  - SEMCHUK KM
AU  - LOVE EJ
TI  - Reliability of environmental and occupational exposure data
      provided by surrogate respondents in a case-control study of
      Parkinson's disease.
SI  - BIOSIS/94/31659
SO  - JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY; 47 (7). 1994. 797-807.
AB  - BIOSIS  COPYRIGHT: BIOL ABS.  This study used data provided by 40
      non-demented Parkinson's disease patients and 101 community
      controls, and by their 110 spouses and 31 adult children to
      assess the reliability of surrogate-provided rural environmental
      and occupational exposure information on the index subjects. The
      level of overall raw agreement between the index subjects and the
      spouse or adult child surrogates varied from 50.0 to 100.0% for
      the case-surrogate group and from 80.6 to 96.0% for the
      control-surrogate group. We did not detect significant
      differences in overall raw agreement between the case-surrogate
      and control-surrogate groups or between the spouse-surrogate and
      adult child-surrogate groups, for any of the variables studied.
      Considering all index subjects and their surrogates, the level of
      overall raw agreement was 80.3% for well water consumption, 82.3%
      for farm living, 85.8% for agricultural work, 87.1% for use of
      pesticides, 87.9% for field crop farming and 91.9% for use of
      fertilizers. However, t estimates were lower, varying from 0.48
      (SE=0.20) for fertilizer use to 0.66 (SE=0.11) for crop farming.
      The level of specific agreement was 52.2% for fertilizer use,
      64.0% for pesticide use, 71.4% for agricultural work, 73.9% for
      crop farming, 80.9% for farm living, and 83.6% for well water
      consumption. The overall findings of this study support the use,
      if necessary, of spouses and adult children of index subjects as
      surrogate respondents in case-control studies of rural
      environmental and  occupational exposures and Parkinson' disease
      and possibly, other neurologic diseases. Specific agreement seems
      to be better index of reliability than overall agreement in
      studies where exposure is rare.
MH  - MATHEMATICS
MH  - STATISTICS
MH  - BIOLOGY
MH  - NERVOUS SYSTEM DISEASES/PATHOLOGY
MH  - ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTANTS/*POISONING
MH  - *OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES
MH  - PUBLIC HEALTH ADMINISTRATION
MH  - STATISTICS
MH  - OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH SERVICES
MH  - PLANTS/GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT
MH  - SOIL
MH  - FERTILIZERS
MH  - SOIL/ANALYSIS
MH  - HERBICIDES
MH  - PEST CONTROL/METHODS
MH  - PESTICIDES
MH  - HOMINIDAE