Journal: Neurology

Study: Doctors at the Mayo Clinic examined the records of everyone who developed Parkinson’s disease in  Olmsted County, Minn., from 1976 to 1995, matched each with someone of similar age and occupation, and conducted inverviews with both groups. It turned out that those with the highest level of education were most likely to have Parkinson’s. Doctors were the most at risk, with about a 4% chance of developing the disease, compared with 2% in the general population. Miners, construction workers, metalworkers and those other blue-collar occupations, by contrast, had about a 1% risk.

What it means: Nobody’s entirely sure. It could be that physical activity is protective against Parkinson’s, and more educated people tend to have more sedentary jobs—or, conversely, that some aspect of very early Parkinson’s tends to make people less likely to go into jobs that require physical effort. Or maybe, since Parkinson’s results from the death of certain specific brain cells, there’s some pre-Parkinsonian state that makes people more receptive to education somehow. The real value of this study, say its authors, is in pointing researchers toward a better understanding of what leads to Parkinson’s in the first place.