Study finds early-onset Parkinson’s burden has more than doubled worldwide
By Hugo Francisco de Souza Reviewed by Susha Cheriyedath, M.Sc. Jul 1 2026, News Medical Life Sciences
A global analysis reveals sharp rises in early-onset Parkinson’s disease among younger adults, exposing widening geographic and sex-based disparities while pointing to environmental clues that require deeper investigation.
In a recent ‘Article in Press’ study published in the journal npj Parkinson’s Disease, researchers collated and analyzed global, regional, and national data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2021, covering 1990 to 2021, to evaluate trends in the burden of early-onset Parkinson’s disease (EOPD) among people aged 20 to 49 years across these geographical scales.
Study findings identified significant increases in incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) across the three decades under investigation, revealing that the global burden of EOPD has more than doubled over this period.
The study further elucidates distinct geographic hotspots in EOPD incidence, an expanding gender gap indicating higher estimated burden among males, and a moderate country-level association with regional agricultural pesticide use, underscoring the need for additional research and targeted public health interventions to better understand and reduce the disease burden across regions.
Background
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder clinically characterized by debilitating motor symptoms, especially tremors, muscle rigidity, and postural instability. Global public health reports indicate that the prevalence of PD has risen at an unprecedented rate from approximately 3.1 million in 1990 to approximately 11.8 million in 2021.
PD has historically been considered a condition affecting the elderly (“late-onset PD”). Consequently, a large portion of the extant literature has focused on this late-onset variant.
However, early-onset Parkinson’s disease (EOPD; defined in this analysis as PD among individuals aged 20-49 years) has gained increasing attention because it affects younger adults and remains less well characterized at the population level, presenting unique and understudied socioeconomic and psychological hazards.
This age-at-onset of EOPD generally coincides with prime working and family-building years, thereby resulting in prolonged disability and profound mental health challenges. Unfortunately, public health agencies previously lacked robust population-level estimates of the burden of EOPD, hindering the development of mitigation strategies.
About the study
The present study aimed to enhance public health knowledge of EOPD by first estimating the population-level burden of the condition across distinct geographic scales. The study leveraged data from the GBD 2021 study to assess EOPD patterns across 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2021.
The study’s analyses specifically focused on individuals included in EOPD estimates between the ages of 20 and 49 and evaluated three primary endpoints: 1. Incidence (number of new estimated EOPD cases per year), 2. Prevalence (number of estimated EOPD patients alive during the years under investigation), and 3. Years lived with disability (YLDs).
These primary endpoints were tracked using the estimated annual percentage change (EAPC) in GBD data over the study period. To further understand the potential influences of economic development on disease distribution, study outcomes were cross-referenced against the Socio-Demographic Index (SDI). SDI is a composite marker measuring regional fertility rates, educational attainment, and per capita income.
Finally, to elucidate the potential impacts of environmental changes and policy implementation on disease distribution, GBD data were matched against the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistical Database (FAOSTAT) to calculate total pesticide application per area of cropland.
Statistical analyses primarily comprised mathematical decomposition models, which were used to isolate whether population growth, population age structure, age-specific prevalence, or disease severity were the dominant drivers of the changing disability numbers.
Study findings
The findings were consistent with a marked escalation of EOPD over the past 31 years, revealing that incidence rose 187% from 28,267 in 1990 to 81,047 in 2021. Prevalence estimates mirrored incidence metrics, rising 154% from 190,487 to 483,872.
When standardizing for age, the study found that incidence increased from 1.46 to 2.35 (EAPC = 1.42%), prevalence from 10.03 to 14.00 (EAPC = 1.09%), and YLD from 1.65 to 2.27 (EAPC = 1.05%) per 100,000 individuals globally.
The study further revealed a marked sex difference in PD’s demographic burden, finding that men were approximately 1.5 times more likely to develop EOPD than their female counterparts. Specifically, the study analyses estimated male prevalence at 16.74 per 100,000 versus 11.23 for females.
Geographically, middle and high-middle SDI zones were observed to experience the fastest EOPD growth rate, led by East Asia and Andean Latin America. At the national level, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador logged the highest age-standardized rates, while China and Norway showed some of the fastest national upward trends; China’s incidence EAPC was 2.55%.
Ecological correlation analyses indicated that EOPD rates correlated positively with total pesticide use per cropland area (rho = 0.41, p < 0.001 for incidence; rho = 0.34, p < 0.001 for prevalence). Decomposition analysis showed that while population growth drove rising disability metrics in low-income zones, escalating underlying prevalence rates were the primary drivers in middle and high-middle SDI regions.
Conclusions
The present study establishes EOPD as a growing global public health burden that varies by socioeconomic development and correlates with pesticide use. The distinct correlation with regional agricultural practices underscores the need for further investigation, improved exposure monitoring, and safer occupational environments, rather than confirming a direct causal effect of pesticide use.
Because the analysis relied on modeled GBD estimates and country-level pesticide-use data, the findings may be affected by underdiagnosis, underreporting, regional data quality differences, and ecological confounding. Therefore, the pesticide findings should be interpreted as associations rather than causal evidence.
Journal reference:
- Zhang, X., et al. (2026). Global regional and national burden and trends of early-onset Parkinson’s disease from 1990 to 2021. npj Parkinson’s Disease. DOI: 10.1038/s41531-026-01449-x. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41531-026-01449-x
Sarah Rotz and Anelyse Weiler / June 29, 2026 / Canadian Dimension
Just before Mark Carney’s Liberal government headed home for the summer, it passed a sweeping law that will undermine how people and the environment are protected from pesticides. On June 18, Bill C-30 passed both the House of Commons and the Senate. Buried in the fine print of this omnibus bill are amendments that give the federal cabinet the authority to authorize the use of any pesticide if it unilaterally determines doing so is in the interest of “economic security” or “national food security.” That could include pesticides previously banned by Health Canada because scientific evidence showed they posed serious risks to human health or the environment.
In the hustle to wrap up Parliament, the government stifled debate on Bill C-30. MPs were given less than 72 hours to table amendments, and there were no public hearings or testimony from researchers or affected communities. Consequently, the federal government didn’t take the time to consider the impacts of these legislative changes on wildlife, farmers, or the health of agricultural workers and rural communities. Twenty-one scientists with research expertise on pesticides and the environment wrote an open letter to the federal government urging it to nix the changes, but their concerns were disregarded. Clearly, this law was not designed to serve the interests of everyday people in Canada who care about their health, worker safety, and the environment.
Who asked for this regulatory overhaul? So far, we don’t know.
What we do know is that earlier this spring, CropLife Canada
big time monsanto/Bayer glyphosate and thus cancer pimps, the major trade association representing the pesticide industry, applauded Minister of Health Marjorie Michel for “her efforts to drive bold action on regulatory modernization “modernization” by politicos, notably con politicos like Mark Carney’s environment and life hating kkklan, and industry, mean deregulation, always. Nothing modern about it, just slash health and environmental protections in the name of profit, cruelty and power, every fucking time. in Canada’s pesticide regulatory system.” Michel proudly noted that she was the first health minister to speak at an event hosted by CropLife, which happened to fall on the same day as Bill C-30 was introduced. Michel and her political advisor have also met with CropLife numerous times over the past year.
The organization praised the new law, saying that it “urges the government to move quickly toward the implementation of the updated mandate.” This cozier relationship between industry and government appears more akin to overt, American-style agribusiness lobbying.
Minister Michel is supposed to receive guidance on changes to pesticide protections from the Pesticide Management Advisory Council, a multi-stakeholder body of Health Canada. However, she has not called any meetings with the council, raising serious questions about why the government has sidelined its own advisory process while advancing such sweeping changes.Because Mr. Fraud Carney is da boss and his actions show him to hate safe air, safe climate, safe food, safe water, wildlife notably listed species, Canada and Canadians.
Canada’s pesticide regulatory framework was already flawed before Bill C-30
Even before the regulatory overhaul, Canada’s pesticide protections were criticized for failing to protect human health. In 2023, Dr. Bruce Lanphear, the co-chair of Health Canada’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Pest Control Products, quit his role over frustrations about the limited role of scientists and lack of transparency in how decisions were made. He asserted that we “can no longer continue to rely on an obsolete regulatory system that protects the pesticide industry more than it protects Canadians.”
Conclusively proving a cause-and-effect relationship between pesticide exposure and adverse health outcomes—especially cancer, autism spectrum disorder, infertility, and neurological disease—can be challenging. Causes may be multifactorial. Pesticide exposures can have impacts even at low doses, and the repercussions may not show up until much later in life.
Nonetheless, scientists have long shed light on how exposure to pesticides like the weedkiller paraquat—which is contained in common commercial herbicide products including Gramoxone, Cyclone SL 2.0, and Firestorm—can corrode our bodies and minds.
For decades, industry scientists recognized that exposure to paraquat could injure the central nervous system. More recently, researchers have shown links between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease. Paraquat is also harmful to bees, upon whom we depend for pollinating crops. Despite mounting evidence of the herbicide’s harms, the pesticide company Syngenta—one of the world’s largest pesticide companies and a central player in paraquat’s commercial history—only voluntarily withdrew paraquat from the Canadian market in 2023.And Herr Hideous Carney is putting it back, sleazily. I bet we’ll never find out when it’s being sprayed over and around us.
That matters because under Bill C-30, the federal cabinet would have the power to authorize the use of pesticides that Health Canada has deemed too dangerous, potentially allowing products like paraquat back onto the market in the name of “food security.”
A narrow vision of food security
“Food security is top of mind in Canada,” a government official stated in a comment to the Toronto Star about Bill C-30. They went on to explain that if a Health Canada ruling affects the ability to produce something, cabinet could intervene “in the interest of economic or national food security” to override a decision to, for example, ban a pesticide.There is no fucking food safety with Carney as over lord, serving some of the worst companies on earth, deregulating for them, however they and Trump’s Pedo Admin demand.
What is immediately clear is that the government’s concern is framed almost entirely in terms of maintaining production and avoiding economic disruption. This reveals a narrow and incredibly fragile understanding of food security. The same official went on to say that “the bill’s changes are only meant to impact environmental rulings—not those affecting human health.”
This, too, reflects a deeply flawed understanding of the relationship between human and ecological health. The two cannot be neatly separated.
Together, these claims ignore a fundamental reality: genuine food security is rooted in the health of the ecosystems that sustain agriculture—healthy, biologically rich soils, clean water, biodiversity, and farming systems capable of adapting to changing conditions without constant chemical intervention.
Why are we so reliant on a system that requires overriding key environmental protections designed to protect human and ecological health in order to keep production going? If maintaining yields in the short-term demands that we bypass environmental safeguards and undermine ecological wellbeing, the issue is not the safeguards themselves, but the underlying function of the system.
As Dean Orr, a farmer practicing conventional and organic agriculture, told Canadian Dimension:
If you need to give cabinet the ability to override science-based bans on pesticides for economic or food security purposes, what does that say about how we approach food security? If our food security relies on the availability of one or two potentially harmful chemicals, how awful is our food security policy?
There are also practical contradictions that arise. Weakening pesticide regulations in the name of short-run economic competitiveness may undermine our ability to trade with other jurisdictions, particularly those with more stringent regulations.It blows our trade with EU for sure. But, Carney doesn’t give a shit about Canada’s trade or EU, he only cares about the rich, and making them richer, notably Trumps’ fucking rich.
How we built a system dependent on pesticides
Pesticide use in Canada continues to rise rapidly. According to Ecojustice’s 2025 Toxic Harvest report, it increased by 47 percent from 2011-2021. Of the products on the market, the use of glyphosate, a chemical widely deployed in commercial herbicides, has increased from 500,000 kilograms in the 1980s to more than 50 million kilograms.
How did we get here?
Pesticides have been used for centuries, initially to control pests affecting both people and crops, such as body lice, mites, and rodents. Early agricultural pesticides were mainly inorganic, such as arsenic, copper, and mercury. It wasn’t until the Second World War that synthetic chemical pesticides rose to prominence. DDT is the most well-known example. Widely used to control malaria- and typhus-carrying insects during the war, it was quickly adopted by chemical companies in agriculture.to get rid of the massive stock piles of toxic shit our nasty species came up with the evil idea to dilute the killer chemicals and figure out how to sell them to the unsuspecting world. Monstrous – like Herrs Carney & Harper.
Public concern followed. Observations of harm to both humans and wildlife (declines in bird populations being the most infamous example) sparked widespread scrutiny. Research accumulated, confirming the serious impacts of DDT. Although both chemical companies and government actors made significant efforts to discredit these findings, the growing evidence led to pesticide bans and regulation.
This history offers important lessons for today. Regulatory systems exist because those who benefitted most from these products undermined and ignored their risk, and we all collectively paid for it.
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Indeed, the rise of pesticide use is the result of deliberate research and policy decisions made by industry and governments about how agriculture should function. Since the early 20th century, companies including Monsanto, BASF, and Bayer have driven the development and commercialization of chemical inputs to promote a model of farming that depends on synthetic inputs as a core function of production, rather than a last resort.Their corporate way is to make humans addicted to pesticide use, and their sick seeds. The only way life on earth will ever have a chance, is when our fucked up hideous species is no more. Unfortunately, with Carney tricking Canadians and creating a cult following, and Trump’s insanely greedy poisonous admin going hog wild on toxic shit too, many other species will be wiped out in Canada and elsewhere, along with us.
Meanwhile, post-war agricultural policy in Canada and across much of the world pushed farming toward industrialization: larger farms, fewer crops, more synthetic inputs, and higher output of single commodities.Mass over population of humans is the main problem. We are billions too many, but none of the rich want to stop over population because they make so much fucking money on each new baby born. Religions are just as bad.What we now call “conventional agriculture” was a product of this particular set of decisions. Standardization made crops uniform and suitable for mass markets and industrial food processing, which supported the rise of food giants like General Mills, Pepsi Co., and Kellogg’s, who are reliant on commodity crops like corn and soy.
As farms specialized, they began producing fewer types of crops. Where a farm would have once grown mixed grains and vegetables and raised livestock, many now produce a single commodity, or only a few, like corn, soy, and wheat. And since these commodity crops were sold cheaply, farmers were forced to expand their operations, or risk falling into a deficit (made worse by rising input costs).
These shifts follow the underlying logics of efficiency, economies of scale, and comparative advantage, but at the expense of farm and food system diversity. Simplified systems create major biological problems. Research shows that monocultures increase vulnerability because pests are able to spread disease easily, soil systems weaken without diverse biological inputs and crop rotations, and the natural predator-prey dynamics that once kept outbreaks at bay begin to break down.Mass synthetic fertilizer use is another toxic problem destroying soils and creating shit foods
Pesticides solve these problems in the short-run. But rather than building farming systems around ecological complexity and local soil and water conditions, this model relies on chemical inputs to override the underlying problems. Importantly, these chemical tools have been designed and promoted by corporations whose business models depend on their continued—and growing—use.
Over time, this has produced a deeper dependency where farmers are less able to adapt using non-chemical methods and innovations, such as diversifying crop rotations, rebuilding soil organic matter, and developing ecological pest control measures. As pesticide application increases, pest populations become resistant, requiring ever more applications to stay afloat. And since these inputs are essential, their costs can rise because manufacturers know that farmers have bought into this system and have limited alternatives.
Won’t be much longer and humans won’t be able to grow any foods, or raise any livestock because the greed, stupidity and nastiness of our species is destroying our atmosphere and oceans, destroying earth’s livable climate, driving heat and cold extremes and floods, and droughts, and storms and winds, and drying up continents.
A call to action
While our food system is now structurally dependent on chemical pesticides, there are growing efforts by farmers and researchers to transition toward more resilient approaches. Sadly, this government is moving in the opposite direction. We collectively call on the federal government to reverse course and strengthen, rather than undermine, pesticide regulation.
There are already concerns that Health Canada’s shift from the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) to the Pesticides Regulatory Directorate in 2026 could weaken its role and authority to deregister pesticides in light of new evidence of harm. After all, its job is to protect ecological health—a responsibility that must not be bypassed when it becomes inconvenient.
The government should also remove the Pest Control Products Act amendments from a distinct budget implementation bill, Bill C-31, which is slated for the fall. This bill would eliminate mandatory 15-year reviews and fixed re-evaluations. Instead, it could invest seriously in approaches proven to reduce reliance on harmful inputs, including diversified cropping systems, building soil health and increasing organic matter, and ecological pest management.
Most importantly, this government needs to rethink who it is listening to. Instead of cozying up to Trump et al and CropLife Canada, it should be guided by farmers, agricultural workers, independent researchers, health experts, and environmental organizations.Carney is destroying organic farming research too, and has wiped out most of our agriculture research stations. He’s a vicious cruel maniac, as evil and anti-livable earth as Trump.
Sarah Rotz is an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University working at the intersection of geography, environmental studies, and political economy. Her work examines industrial agriculture, financial concentration, technology, and policy, and how these conditions are shaped by and reinforce capitalist, colonial, and gendered dynamics. She also works and organizes with movements for land and food sovereignty, justice, and resistance.
Anelyse Weiler is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Victoria. Her community-engaged research focuses on opportunities to protect workers from occupational health and safety hazards such as climate-related extreme heat, sexual violence, and pesticides. She also examines how both social movements and industry lobbying can shape laws and policies, including anti-whistleblower laws on factory farms. Alongside her research, she is a director with the BC Employment Standards Coalition and a Street Teams leader with the Worker Solidarity Network.
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