The causes of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Parkinson’s disease are not known. Both diseases are likelier to occur in older white men, and it is thought that environmental exposures and lifestyle choices may play a role.
…
New data from the CDC appears to challenge some of this conventional wisdom. The authors collected as much mortality data as was available to them from 1985 to 2011. They tallied the number of deaths from ALS and Parkinson’s, and sorted them by occupational group. In total, the researchers analyzed more than 12 million deaths across 30 U.S. states.
…
The occupations that are linked to the greatest proportion of ALS and Parkinson’s deaths are mostly white-collar in nature, such as management, financial, architectural, computing, legal, and education jobs.
The conventional wisdom would suggest that occupations associated with low socioeconomic status […] would be linked to the greatest number of ALS and Parkinson’s deaths because of workers’ environmental exposures to various chemicals. But that’s not what the CDC found. Instead, they found that these jobs were linked to a smaller number of deaths than would be expected.
…
The CDC’s findings were surprising. If they are replicated by others, then it would suggest that researchers may be totally in the dark in regard to the cause of most cases of ALS and Parkinson’s.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Are White-Collar Jobs Linked To ALS, Parkinson’s?
