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Researchers link banned pesticide with Parkinson’s

A banned pesticide still lingering in the environment has been shown in research to damage human brain cells and is thought to trigger Parkinson’s disease.
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Researchers say the impact of dieldrin, or organochlorine pesticide, and other banned pesticides steadily should dissipate in the environment over the next few decades. Now, however, they remain in the soil and present a suspicious link to Parkinson’s.

“We can’t say at this point that pesticides cause Parkinson’s disease, but we feel it accelerates the process,” said Kurt Pennell, an associate professor at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Pennell and his group found that levels of dieldrin in the autopsied brain tissue of 14 Parkinson’s patients were more than three times those of 12 similarly aged people who didn’t have the disease.

“Our research shows that elevated levels of dieldrin are associated with Parkinson’s disease in humans, which is supported by an animal model study that correlates low-level exposure to dieldrin with early markers of Parkinson’s disease,” he said.

Pennell presented his team’s findings at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

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