Team to study the epidemiology of Parkinson's Disease

[soccertese]

john,
best of luck. i've stated my opinions before, and basically you could be a genius and i'd feel the same way. i'm certainly not being skeptical because you have pd.
i'm just skeptical that with the pressure to publish and how inexpensive it is to do statistical analysis in comparison to laboratory work and no shortage of university biostatisticians why you think there is a need to get all sorts of people with pd working on this? it's not my job to justify the need for this, you're making the pitch, you should be the one to justify the need just as if you were making a pitch for grant money.

your reply to lindy has me confused as to what you really want since what she did is what goes on everyday on this message board, share thoughts, experiences and info.

[soccertese]

http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.bl...-1+Diabetes%29

even professionals often produce questionable conclusions from pop. studies. according to author and he does great job explaining limitations of these studies and the consequences of stating their findings - there are consequences if wrong.

only posted this because showed up in my mail box today

[Dianna_Wood]

ie: Republican Survey may ask if the consumer is more concerned:

a) lower the National debt
b) allow healthcare changes to go forward
c) Concerned about National Security

Several erroneous conclusions can be drawn from answers. First, the survey gives the consumer the option to give a different answer, second, individual thoughts are suppressed, thirdly, How to solve each of these questions does not support one party over the other.

The same could hold true for a PD survey. Every individual has different symptoms. Therefore patients clustered according to symptoms cuts out the individual needs of one patient.

Rather than putting patients into classifications, the patient needs to draw their physician out of typecasting them and see them as an individual.

For what it's worth,
Dianna

[Songfellow]

Johnt,

my expertise is in building, analyzing, modelling and implementing optimized designs based upon very large multivariable datasets.

I have extensive experience in design of experiments, non-linear statistical methods (i.e. computer artificial intelligence) and in the application of chaos theory to real world problems.

The largest variable set that I have designed and successfully analyzed was for 450 variables.
Feel free to send me an email if you think I might be of any help.

Steve

[johnt]

Soccertese writes:

"your reply to lindy has me confused as to what you really want since what she did is what goes on everyday on this message board, share thoughts, experiences and info."

The immediate aim is to have a list of 42 things correlated with Parkinson's by Thursday.

Any approach is reasonable, provided some evidence is provided to support the assertion. A literature survey is the easiest way to get started, but I hope that some people access the raw data.

At the individual level, you're right to say, people report on articles all the time. The difference is what happens next. I suggest we aggregate and mine the data contained in the referenced papers. At its very, very simplest putting together a list of things correlated with Parkinson's would add value to just having isolated reports.

Here's 7 correlations, Parkinson's prevalence and ticks:
American dog tick, positive correlation
Blacklegged tick, positive
Brown dog tick, nil
Gulf coast tick, positive
Lone star tick, positive
Rocky Mountain wood tick, negative
Western blacklegged tick,negative

Correlations are based on eyeballing the Willis map and maps of tick distribution provided in the CDC paper:

http://www.cdc.gov/ticks/geographic_distribution.html

Now, eyeballing the data and giving a verbal description of the correlation between the factors is better than nothing, but it's far from perfect. Best of all would be to get to the raw data. If the raw data cannot be accessed, better than "eyeballing" is to get the computer to do it, essentially, comparing the corresponding pixels on the maps. I'm writing a program to do this.

John

[soccertese]

john, i'm not a moderator and got kicked off the board once for rudeness but i again have to express my OPINION that what you are trying to accomplish is more for you than for anything that might really help people with pd and could actually do harm.

lets say you think you found a correlation and it's absolutely wrong? researchers realize this and are very cautious about anything they say, you seem to be a loose canon imho.
who's going to doublecheck your work? i for one wouldn't believe any conclusions you came up with unless checked and verified by known experts. there's no way to know you did the analysis correctly or falsified your results. that's why we have peer review. even with the best of intentions, researchers make mistake and they submit their work for peer review to check for mistakes and for review even before they do their research.
i had to do a research project for my masters in agronomy and had to get the design okayed before i could start.

42 "correlations" that may or may not have any significance but might get a lot of people unnecessarily concerned? how do you know the tick data is even usable? that another report might have better data?
you think people who read this board might start freaking out about going outside because you observed a possible "correlation" between ticks and pd? or might go out and hire exterminators and do more harm spraying pesticides? everything posted here has consequences, there's a lot of people looking for hope and don't have a scientific background.

seems like you are playing with fire.

as far as assembling lots of facts about pd, have you looked at any of the dozens of general information books written about pd that can be found on amazon or ebay?

[johnt]

soccertese, I disagree.

On a more positive note, more data:

Taylor et al. report:

"Four factors were associated with increased risk for PD:
(1) head injury (OR=6.23, confidence interval [CI]: 2.58-15.07);
(2) family history of PD (OR=6.08, CI: 2.35-15. 58);
(3) family history of tremor (OR=3.97, CI: 1.17-13.50);
and (4) history of depression (OR=3.01, CI: 1.32-6.88).
A mean latency of 36.5 (SE=2.81) years passed between the age of first reported head injury and PD onset. A mean latency of 22 (SE=2.66) years passed between the onset of the first reported symptoms of depression and onset of PD." [Reformatted by me.]

Reference:

[1] "Environmental, medical, and family history risk factors for Parkinson's disease: a New England-based case control study."
Taylor CA, Saint-Hilaire MH, Cupples LA, Thomas CA, Burchard AE, Feldman RG, Myers RH.
Am J Med Genet. 1999 Dec 15;88(6):742-9
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10581500

John

[Conductor71]

John,


Funny, this bumped up today. I was just thinking that given the recent exchange on speculation we needed to start listing what we do know is true about PD. This might be helpful in finding correlations too.

I am all for this but think we need to form some sort of Google group where we can all share documents and our correlations. Otherwise we will have some redundancies in lists and this thread will become impossible to tame.

We also need some basic info architecture, so we track info, search it, sort it and otherwise make it accessible and usable....should we build some sort of rudimentary database and have documents save as .xls file before attaching.

I can set up a Google group or what not, just let me know. PM me and we can chat further.

Thank you for taking charge!

Laura

[johnt]

Some of the material below was reported by Rick, to whom my thanks, in July, 2012. See:
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...ghlight=harris

Harris et al. write [1]:
"Severe influenza was associated with PD (odds ratio [OR]: 2.01; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.16-3.48), although this effect was attenuated when reports were restricted to those occurring 10 or more years before diagnosis.
Childhood illnesses were inversely associated with PD, particularly
red measles (OR: 0.65; 95% CI: 0.48-0.90).
Several animal exposures were associated with PD, with statistically significant effects for
cats (OR: 2.06; 95% CI: 1.09-3.92) and
cattle (OR: 2.23; 95% CI: 1.22-4.09)."
(My reformatting.)

Harris et al. [2] write:
"While ever being occupationally exposed to WBV [Whole-body vibration] was inversely associated with Parkinson's disease (odds ratio = 0.67, 95% confidence interval: 0.48, 0.94), higher intensities had consistently elevated odds ratios, with a statistically significant effect being noted for intermediate intensities when exposures were restricted to the 10 years or more prior to diagnosis."

So as to keep everything in one place, I've copied the two items below from my recent posting to another thread.

I can't find a clear picture of the relationship between PD and alcohol, but a feature article in Neurology Review [3] says:
"People who moderately consume beer may reduce their risk of developing Parkinson’s disease by 27%, compared with nondrinkers."

The picture with green tea is also unclear, but Quintana [4] states:
"There was a clear protective effect of tea consumption in the pooled risk estimate [OR: 0.83 (95% confidence interval 0.74 to 0.92)] with 2215 cases and 145578 controls."

References:

[1] "Association of Parkinson's disease with infections and occupational exposure to possible vectors."
Harris MA, Tsui JK, Marion SA, Shen H, Teschke K.
Mov Disord. 2012 Aug;27(9):1111-7. doi: 10.1002/mds.25077. Epub 2012 Jul 2.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22753266

[2] "Occupational exposure to whole-body vibration and Parkinson's disease: results from a population-based case-control study."
Harris MA, Marion SA, Spinelli JJ, Tsui JK, Teschke K.
Am J Epidemiol. 2012 Aug 15;176(4):299-307. doi: 10.1093/aje/kws017. Epub 2012 Jul 12.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22798480

[3] "Does Alcohol Consumption Reduce the Risk of Parkinson’s Disease?"
Neurology Reviews, 2011;19(12)14-15.
http://www.neurologyreviews.com/Arti...SI=&FullText=1

[4] "Parkinson's Disease and Tea: A Quantitative Review"
José Luis Barranco Quintana, MD, MPH,
Mohamed Farouk Allam, MPH, PhD, Amparo Serrano Del Castillo, MD, PhD and
Rafael Fernández-Crehuet Navajas, MD, PhD
J Am Coll Nutr February 2009 vol. 28 no. 1 1-6
http://www.jacn.org/content/28/1/1.full

John

[VICTORIALOU]

association of PD and certain pesticides