Parkinson's: the role of environmental pollutants in the risk of developing the disease

"Why me?" When a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease is announced, the question is a recurring one. Is it because of age, genes, environmental pollution, lifestyle... or even a bit of all of these? "It's frustrating for patients not to have a clear answer to this question , "says David Grabli, neurologist at the Parkinson's expert center at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris (AP-HP). Especially if they are younger than the image they have of the age of people affected by the disease, and if they have no identifiable family history."

Pure genetic forms, linked to the mutation of a gene and hereditary, only represent, in fact, 5% of cases. In the remaining 95%, the risk of developing this neurodegenerative disease, the prevalence of which increases with age, is the result of an "equation with lots of unknowns ," underlines David Devos, neurologist at the Lille University Hospital and Inserm. For each person, there are at least a hundred causes, put into an equation and weighted, which come into play to explain that after ten or fifteen years of the body's compensation mechanisms, the loss of neurons will be significant enough for clinical signs to appear."

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