Pesticides and parkinson’s disease: causal relationship at the population and individual level?

Pesticide exposure has been associated with an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease (PD). As a result, PD has been recognized as an occupational disease among agricultural workers in France for over a decade. In March 2024, a similar recommendation for recognition was issued in Germany. Pesticides encompass a wide range of functional classes and chemical groups, making it challenging–evaluate their specific effects. Numerous epidemiological studies, including cohort and case-control studies, have investigated the association between pesticide exposure and PD risk. While some report statistically significant associations, others yield inconclusive results, partly due–the inherent difficulties in accurately quantifying pesticide exposure and overlap in the use of different pesticides. In addition, a large body of experimental research has examined the neurotoxicity of various pesticides on dopaminergic neurons using both in vitro and in vivo models of PD. This review summarizes the findings from epidemiological and experimental studies and discusses the current evidence linking pesticide exposure–risk for Parkinson’s disease.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of neural transmission

• Publication date

  2025-11-12

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s00702-025-03054-3PMID 41222711PMCID 12855454
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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