Eight healthy eating patterns not linked to Parkinson’s risk
Two US cohorts of 70,973 women and 45,820 men followed for up to 32 years showed no association across eight healthy dietary patterns.
Our read
Populations- Studied:
- Cohort study of US women and men, up to 32 years, against lowest quintile
- What changed:
- Parkinson's disease risk did not differ in the highest adherence quintile against the lowest quintile across healthy dietary patterns
- The catch:
- Participants were predominantly white US health professionals with relatively good nutritional status
- In the record:
- The 7th paper on healthy dietary patterns with results in people; 15 on record in all.
Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
US nurses and male health professionals—70,973 women and 45,820 men without Parkinson’s disease at baseline—were followed for up to 32 years in an observational cohort study. The women’s cohort originally enrolled nurses aged 30–55 in 1976; the men’s enrolled health professionals aged 40–75 in 1986. This analysis began in 1986.
Participants reported their diets every four years. Researchers compared the highest and lowest fifths of adherence to eight healthy eating patterns, including Mediterranean-style and plant-based diets. None was associated with Parkinson’s risk. During follow-up, 579 women and 600 men developed Parkinson’s. The analysis accounted for factors including physical activity and smoking. Researchers also used an eight-year lag between dietary reports and disease outcomes to reduce the possibility that early disease symptoms had changed eating habits.
Why it matters
For Parkinson’s, an age-related disease, the authors concluded that these patterns may be ineffective for prevention, despite their associations with lower risks of several other chronic diseases.
Caveats
Diet questionnaires may misclassify eating habits, and these health professionals may not reflect the wider population. The estimates allowed for both lower and higher risk, so the results do not rule out an association.
From the paper
- Follow-up
Over a 32‐year follow‐up period, 1179 individuals developed PD (579 women and 600 men).
- Result
The pooled hazard ratios (HRs) for PD comparing the highest versus the lowest quintiles of adherence to a dietary pattern were 1.01 (95% CI: 0.75–1.36) for AHEI‐2010, 1.11 (95% CI: 0.91–1.35) for AMED, 1.12 (95% CI: 0.69–1.79) for DASH, 1.01 (95% CI: 0.84–1.22) for hPDI …
- Limitation
First, given the observational nature of this study, residual confounding cannot be ruled out.
Quoted word for word from the full text on PubMed Central.
- Healthy dietary patterns
- Alternate Mediterranean diet
- Alternative healthy eating index-2010
- Dietary approaches to stop hypertension
- Parkinson's disease
- Humans
The paper
Healthy Dietary Patterns and Risk of Parkinson's Disease
Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University; Harvard University
Movement Disorders, Jun 4, 2026, Open access
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