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From: Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Newsgroups: misc.news.internet.discuss
Subject: Re: Parkinson's risk increases with proximity to golf courses
Date: 07 Jun 2025 11:47:10 +0100 (BST)
Organization: University of Cambridge, England
Message-ID: <kKm*RyqeA@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>
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Retrograde <fungus@amongus.com.invalid> wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:37:34 -0500
> JAB <here@is.invalid> wrote:
> 
> > JAMA study says Parkinson's risk increases with proximity to golf
> > courses treated with pesticides. Not gonna state that presidents with
> > heavy proximity to golf courses might have more likelihood of
> > neurological problems but worth exploring? 
> 
> Correlation, causation - try to get together.
> 
> Golf course attract retirees from the boomer generation, who are more
> likely to have alzheimers than the millenials living in apartments
> downtown.
> 
> America's ability to reason scientifically is in sharp decline.

Unsurprisingly they thought of that:

"Logistic regression was used with PD as the outcome and distance to nearest
golf course as the exposure variable, adjusting for age, sex, race,
ethnicity, year of index, block group–level median household income in
2010,24 residency Rural Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) from 2010,25 and health
care utilization.  RUCA designation was categorized as urban (coded as 1),
suburban (2 to 6), and rural (7 to 10).  Health care utilization prior to
the index date was defined as the mean number of days per year with at least
ICD-9 or ICD-10 code recorded in the medical record, averaged over the 5
years prior to the index date.  Results were reported as adjusted odds
ratios (aORs) with 95% CIs.  Secondary analysis evaluated the association
between water service area characteristics and risk of developing PD.  The
primary water service area characteristics were type of water service area
(groundwater with a golf course, groundwater without a golf course, and
private well), groundwater vulnerability (vulnerable groundwater with a golf
course, vulnerable groundwater without a golf course, nonvulnerable
groundwater with a golf course, and nonvulnerable groundwater without a golf
course), minimum well depth in the water service area (shallow [less than
100 ft] or deep [100 ft or deeper]), and location of municipal wells (at
least 1 well on a golf course vs no wells on a golf course).  As a
sensitivity analysis, we repeated our analysis after stratifying by RUCA
(comparing our results with results of those living in urban areas).  A
secondary sensitivity analysis was performed which restricted to controls
selected from Olmstead County.  Analysis was conducted with R version 4.2.2
(R Project for Statistical Computing).  All tests were 2-sided with a
threshold of significance of P < .05."