Environmental risk factors for Parkinson’s disease

Most cases of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are due a complex combination of genetic and environmental risk factors (e.g., pollutants, pathogens, lifestyle, and diet). However, how these environmental factors contribute to disease risk and pathogenesis remains unclear. Increased understanding of the mechanisms driving PD risk from environmental exposures will be critical to developing prevention strategies, therapeutic avenues, as well as identifying emerging environmental risks for PD.

While studies of environmental risk for PD are a growing area of research, there are several challenges that have limited the mechanistic insight into neurodegeneration from PD-related toxicants. This is primarily due to limitations on the collection and quality of PD-relevant exposure data in epidemiological studies and experimental exposure paradigms that do not emulate environmentally relevant, real-world exposures. Recent advances, such as the development of metabolomic methods and novel models of experimental exposures, can be combined with basic toxicological principles to expand our understanding of convergent mechanisms of neurotoxicity involved in PD.

This Collection will showcase developments that advance our understanding of environmental risks for PD, with a targeted goal of prevention or intervention strategies focused on mechanistic outcome measures. Topics include:

• Improving environmentally relevant exposures in vitro and in vivo to better emulate human exposure conditions linked to PD
• Assessing mechanisms of gene-environment interaction beyond additive risk
• Exposures across the lifespan and in both biological sexes
• Optimized epidemiological studies PD from environmental risks, such as the inclusion of geospatial and longitudinal biometric data 
• High-resolution metabolomics and epigenomics to understand the exposome of PD 
• Incorporating a broader range of pathological outcomes to model long-term and prodromal etiology of PD 
• Mechanisms of non-motor symptoms and disease progression caused by environmental exposures