Ending Parkinson's Disease

**Ray Dorsey, Todd Sherer, Michael Okun, and Bastiaan Bloem**

*Estimated Reading Time: 75 to 90 minutes*

Parkinson's disease is not a rare condition affecting a handful of elderly people. It is one of the fastest growing neurological disorders in the world, and its rise cannot be explained by aging alone. This book argues that much of the suffering Parkinson's causes is preventable, and that the tools to prevent it already exist. You will learn why the disease begins years before tremors appear, which environmental exposures increase risk, how care can reach people wherever they live, and what a coordinated global response would look like. You will also learn what you can do today to lower your own risk and help change the trajectory of this disease.

This book is for anyone who wants to understand Parkinson's disease beyond the surface. It is for people recently diagnosed and their families. It is for clinicians who want to recognize the disease earlier and treat it better. It is for policymakers and public health officials who shape the environments we live in. And it is for anyone who believes that a disease affecting millions should not be accepted as an inevitable cost of modern life.

Something is happening to the human brain, and it is happening at a scale that most people have not noticed. In 1990, roughly 2.6 million people worldwide were living with Parkinson's disease. By 2015, that number had climbed to 6.3 million. Projections suggest that by 2040, at least 12.9 million people will have the disease, and some estimates run as high as 17.5 million. These are not small adjustments. They represent a doubling and then some, a trajectory that outpaces what population aging alone would predict. For decades, Parkinson's has been treated as a disease of aging, a unfortunate consequence of living longer. The logic seemed reasonable: older populations have more Parkinson's, and populations are getting older. But when researchers looked more carefully at the numbers, they found something that aging could not explain. The rise was too steep, too widespread, and too concentrated in places where industrial chemicals had become part of daily life. This is the central observation that drives *Ending Parkinson's Disease*. The authors, four leading neurologists and researchers, argue that Parkinson's is not simply a disease of aging. It is a disease of the industrial age, shaped by the environments we have built and the substances we have released into them. And if the environment is part of the cause, then the environment can be part of the solution. The problem is that most people, including many doctors, still think of Parkinson's as a tremor disease. They picture an elderly person with shaking hands…