A message to Parkinson’s Disease researchers: Design a study to distinguish between these two competing explanations of the fact that the incidence of Parkinson’s is lower among smokers – Beragampengetahuan

After reading our recent post, “How to quit smoking, and a challenge to currently-standard individualistic theories in social science,” Gur Huberman writes:

You may be aware that the incidence of Parkinson (PD) is lower in the smoking population than in the general population, and that negative relation is stronger for the heavier & longer duration smokers.

The reason for that is unknown. Some neurologists conjecture that there’s something in smoked tobacco which causes some immunity from PD. Other conjecture that whatever causes PD also helps people quit or avoid smoking. For instance, a neurologist told me that Dopamine (the material whose deficit causes PD) is associated with addiction not only to smoking but also to coffee drinking.

Your blog post made me think of a study that will try to distinguish between the two explanations for the negative relation between smoking and PD. Such a study will exploit variations (e.g., in geography & time) between the incidence of smoking and that of PD.

It will take a good deal of leg work to get the relevant data, and a good deal of brain work to set up a convincing statistical design. It will also be very satisfying to see convincing results one way or the other. More than satisfying, such a study could help develop medications to treat or prevent PD.

If this project makes sense perhaps you can bring it to the attention of relevant scholars.

OK, here it is. We’ll see if anyone wants to pick this one up.

I have some skepticism about Gur’s second hypothesis, that “whatever causes PD also helps people quit or avoid smoking.” I say this only because, from my perspective, and as discussed in the above-linked post, the decision to smoke seems like much more of a social attribute than an individual decision. But, sure, I could see how there could be correlations.

In any case, it’s an interesting statistical question as well as an important issue in medicine and public health, so worth thinking about.