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Altho' I attribute the majority of the cell damage in my brain which ultimately led to my PD to have been caused by the severe reaction I had to Compazine about 14 or so years ago, I have often wondered if the fact that afterward, in grad school, I worked in a reactor on campus, might've been the last straw, so to speak, which pushed things over the edge. It's kinda ironic, but my thesis research was on the oxidative degradation of cable insulation due to gamma radiation. Basically, this is just the same concept as all of the antioxidant research going on. We were using high energy radiation to bombard the insulation and make it decay. The process is significantly sped up in the presence of oxygen. I've wondered at the connection, cuz here I was bombarding the insulation (an organic material, like my brain), with high energy, and it seems within the realm of logic to wonder that the very same processes were ocurring in my brain at the same time. To me, this seems all the more likely, as my brain was already likely damaged by the compazine, and that incident wasn't more than 2-3 years before grad school and this research. As for everyone, it's probably the synergistic and cumulative effects of many types of exposures and stresses, but it wouldn't surprise me at all for my theory to have some basis. I wonder, then could there also be some sort of statistical correlation between PD and other types of brain cell damage and living at higher altitutudes (or maybe working at them, as pilots do). I know that there's definitely a skin cancer link at higher altitudes. You'd probably have to take into account the actual percentage of cases vs the total population in a given area, cuz on the two coasts (sea level), there's gonna be a higher number of cases due to more population, but I wonder how the actual percentages might come out. Wendy T.