Golf courses are serene sanctuaries for retirees and business bros looking to simultaneously get wasted and feel more rage than they have in their entire lives, and all before noon. But it’s not all sunshine and beer bottles. Golf courses are a notorious scourge on the environment, and a new study published in JAMA Network Open suggests living near one might also come with the unexpected hazard of an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers led by Brittany Krzyzanowski of the Barrow Neurological Institute found that people who live within a mile of a golf course had a 126 percent higher risk of developing Parkinson’s compared to those farther away.
Is the game itself slowly deteriorating people’s minds, even if they’re just in the vicinity of it? Not quite. While golf might be so dull that it deteriorates your brain, the actual culprit here is more likely the pesticides used to keep golf courses bug-free.
The idea is that pesticides drift through the air or seep into local water supplies, potentially exposing residents to neurotoxic substances. To be clear, the study doesn’t say golf courses cause Parkinson’s. It’s more like they found a link and are suggesting that research teams around the globe spend a little bit more time looking into this to see if there’s something more to it, as that’s how science works.
The study is controversial, however. According to Science Alert, a UK-based Parkinson’s charity called Parkinson’s UK calls the hypothesis “reductive,” saying that reducing the cause of Parkinson’s down to golf course proximity ignores the complex interplay of genetics and environment.
A researcher with Parkinson’s UK, Katherine Fletcher, argues that the research linking pesticides to Parkinson’s is mixed at best. But here’s another interesting note that sides with the study’s findings: farms also use a lot of pesticides, and farmers are known to be at a higher risk of Parkinson’s.
Still, David Dexter from Parkinson’s UK has other problems with the study, like how the researchers didn’t test the groundwater or air near the golf courses, nor did they track if participants lived there long enough for exposure to matter. He says they also didn’t account for other pollutants, like car exhaust.
Our modern world is so full of harmful chemicals that we could be getting Parkinson’s from everything, so why single out golf courses? It would be fascinating to see if the same could be said of other big plots of land that need to be regularly loaded with pesticides, like public parks.
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