A reoccurring theme in Parkinson’s disease research, is the search for environmental causes for the disease. Some point a finger at welding rod fumes. Some PD patients have even won court cases against their employers on the basis that their exposure to welding rod fumes contributed to their PD development.
A team of environmental scientists have been researching whether or not welding rod fumes accelerate or cause Parkinson's disease. Dr. C.M. Fored, of the Karolinska University Hotel in Sweden, led the study, which has been published recently in the professional journal
Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Sweden is an ideal place to conduct such a study, because the Swedish health care system collects and catalogs data about its patients in a somewhat uniform fashion. They were able to compare over 49,000 men that would have been regularly exposed to welding rods, to a control population (a group that would not have had regular exposure to welding rods) of over 489,000. The researchers found that welders did not display, “. . . any statistically significantly increased risks for Parksinson's disease or other basal ganglia and movement disorders.”
Click here to read a
Business Wire article about this most recent study. The story points out that there are other studies that have arrived at similar conclusions.
If you have a comment on this story, or any other, please email us at
mnilsen@myparkinsonsinfo.com. Certainly, these findings may be disapointing for some. If you spent a lot of time being exposed to welding rod fumes, you may have a strong opinion to the contrary of these finding.
