"All told, more than half of Parkinson’s research dollars in the past two decades have flowed toward genetics.
But Parkinson’s rates in the US have doubled in the past 30 years. And studies suggest they will climb another 15 to 35 percent in each coming decade. This is not how an inherited genetic disease is supposed to behave.
Despite the avalanche of funding, the latest research suggests that only 10 to 15 percent of Parkinson’s cases can be fully explained by genetics. The other three-quarters are, functionally, a mystery. “More than two-thirds of people with PD don’t have any clear genetic link,” says Briana De Miranda, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “So, we’re moving to a new question: What else could it be?”
“The health you enjoy or don’t enjoy today is a function of your environment in the past,” says Ray Dorsey, a physician and professor of neurology at the University of Rochester. Your “environment” could be the refinery a town over, the lead in the paint of your mother’s home, the plastic sheath of the Hot Pocket you microwaved in 1996. It is air pollution and PFAS and pesticides and so much more.
And this environment of yours—the sum of all your exposures, from conception to the grave—could be making you sicker than you realize. In a study of half a million Britons, Oxford researchers determined that lifestyle and the environment is 10 times more likely to explain early death than genetics. But that also offers a tantalizing prospect. If Parkinson’s is an environmental disease, as Dorsey and a small band of researchers emphatically believe, then maybe we can end it."
https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-thought-parkinsons-was-in-our-genes-it-might-be-in-the-water/
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