THIS paper concluded that the incidence of pd was not higher in teachers or nurses and discusses why the earlier research might have erroneously come to that conclusion. i didn't do an exhaustive literature search so i'll gladly accept other research citations.
http://occmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/57/1/50.full
* Oxford Journals
* Medicine
* Occupational Medicine
* Volume57, Issue1
* Pp. 50-56.
* Expand+
Occupational titles as risk factors for Parkinson's disease
1. Smita ****,
2. Sean Semple,
3. Finlay **** and
4. Anthony Seaton
+ Author Affiliations
1.
Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, University of Aberdeen Medical School, Foresterhill, Aberdeen, UK
1. Correspondence to: Finlay ****, Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, University of Aberdeen Medical School, Foresterhill, Aberdeen, UK. Tel: +44 1224 558191; e-mail: f.****@abdn.ac.uk
Tsui et al. [8] investigated the associations between occupation and PD in a case–control study set in Vancouver, Canada. They found that PD was positively associated with employment in teaching or health care. Information on the occupations of the cases was obtained from them or their family members but job data on the controls were drawn from the 1991 Canadian census. The reliability of proxy data had been questioned in some previous studies [9,10]. This Canadian study had its origins in the observation that both teachers and health care workers appeared to be over-represented among PD sufferers attending the Movement Disorders Clinic at the University of British Columbia Hospital, Vancouver. The authors hypothesized that their observation might be due to a link between high exposure to respiratory infections in these occupations and PD. An alternative explanation of this finding is that these groups may have better access to health care than the general population, so confounding the association. One criticism of this study is that information on occupation was limited and did not include all jobs held during a working lifetime.
As in the study by Kirkey et al. [16], we recorded occupational histories including all jobs held for a period of 6 months or more. Although we used a slightly different system for the industry classification from that used by Kirkey et al. [16], the occupational title classification was similar. This allows comparisons to be drawn between our findings and those of Kirkey et al. [16]. The study by Park et al. [17] is not directly comparable as they used the Korean national classification systems for industry and occupational titles.
Except for work in the processing category, we did not find significant associations between occupational or industrial categories and the risk of developing PD.