Evidence of Climate Change Impact on Parkinson’s Disease

We have investigated the link between climate change and Parkinson’s diseases (PD) by contrasting variations between 1990 and 2016 of PD patients’ indices (prevalence, deaths, and disability-adjusted life years) and climate indices (warming and annual average temperature) for 185 countries. Countries have been clustered in four categories, depending on whether they had higher-than-median warming and higher-than-median temperature, and for each cluster variations in PD patients’ and climate indices have been studied. In the cluster of the 25 countries (home to about 900 million people) characterized by higher-than-average warming and higher-than-average temperature, we have found evidence of a correlation between more intense warming and higher variations. This statistical result is discussed and linked to other evidence reported in literature. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a statistically-sound link between climate change and the epidemiological data of PD patients has been found and documented.