Column | A remarkable benefit of smoking and drinking

Quitting smoking, eating healthier and exercising more, those are the top three good intentions for the new year. Those who persevere reduce their risk of heart attacks, strokes, cancer and other nasty diseases. Does a healthy lifestyle also help against Parkinson’s disease?

Parkinson’s is a disease of the brain. About one in thirty people are going to get it someday. Patients shake their hands and their movements become slow and stiff. This is because certain nerve cells that control movement have broken down. Will our good intentions reduce the chance of that happening?

Healthy living starts with not smoking. Curiously enough, this works the other way around with Parkinson’s: smoking cigarettes protects against it. The longer you smoke, the better bigger the protective effect. This is not because smokers die sooner; Smokers who live to the age of seventy or eighty are also half as likely to develop Parkinson’s as peers who have never smoked. It appears to be something in cigarettes, other differences between smokers and non-smokers have been extensively researched and nothing has been found to explain the difference. You would almost think that as a Parkinson’s patient you should quickly get a carton of cigarettes, but once you have the disease, smoking no longer seems to help, and nicotinepleisters not at all.

Long-term smoking therefore reduces the risk of Parkinson’s. We must contrast this with the much greater risk that smoking will give you cancer, cardiovascular disease, multiple sclerose or get COPD. For your overall health, there is no doubt that quitting is better. The same consideration applies to alcohol. There are strong ones Clues that drinking one or two glasses a day protects against Parkinson’s. But alcohol’s reduction in Parkinson’s pales in comparison to the increase in your risk of much more common diseases, such as stroke, cancer, liver disease and accidents. Drinking less remains a good resolution.

A healthy sport

Fortunately, when it comes to exercise, everything is as expected again; More exercise clearly reduces the risk of developing Parkinson’s. In people who already have it, the severity of the disease is also reduced by more exercise and the deterioration slowed. Choose a healthy sport, because boxing and rugby cause concussions and those increase the risk. Therefore, wear a helmet when cycling.

Other good news is that you don’t have to give up coffee. On the contrary, coffee drinkers are less likely to develop Parkinson’s. Coffee is also OK, it does not cause any other diseases. At most, too much coffee can make you feel agitated and sleep poorly, but you will notice that automatically.

Then the healthy food. A glass of skimmed milk or yogurt every day is a good idea. It contains valuable minerals, is good for teeth and blood pressure and may help against colon cancer. But what a frustration: milk drinkers are actually more likely to develop Parkinson’s. Maybe that has nothing to do with milk and comes from something else that milk drinkers do, but there is no evidence for that. I like drinking milk and I’m not going to stop; I take comfort in the thought that Parkinson’s is a fairly rare disease.

Spraying pesticides

Finally: eating organic, does that help? They contain fewer pesticides than regular food and pesticides appear to be a cause of Parkinson’s. Farmers who pesticides syringes are clearly more likely to get the disease. If you are going to kill the moths in your wardrobe with a spray can, I would put on a mask and keep the children away. You have to ingest quite a bit of pesticide before you see an effect; live near agricultural land where spraying takes place seems to make little difference. That’s why I don’t expect much from organic food when it comes to Parkinson’s; regular fruits and vegetables also contain whole few pesticides and those associated with Parkinson’s are banned in the EU.

Why then are more and more people getting this nasty disease these days? This is due to the aging of the population; it is a disease of old people. If you look at people of the same age, the risk of developing Parkinson’s increases over the years not increased, but older people are much more likely to develop it than young people, and more and more people are growing old. This is due to better treatments and medicines and a healthier lifestyle. As a result, relatively fewer people die from cardiovascular disease and cancer and we live longer. Those extra years are a blessing, but the wear and tear continues and sooner or later other conditions inevitably arise, such as dementia, deafness, blindness, disabling joint pain – and Parkinson’s. The only way to avoid it is to die in time. So euthanasia. I therefore expect that the criteria for euthanasia will be expanded in the coming years, both because of the fear of deterioration and because of rising healthcare costs.

Dementia, Parkinson’s or euthanasia, it is a depressing choice. Unfortunately, all the good intentions in the world won’t change that.

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