Parkinson's disease is one the main neurodegenerative diseases, but there are little French data on its frequency. Previous studies suggest that pesticide exposure is a risk factor for Parkinson's disease; the agricultural population is therefore particularly interesting. Westudied the value of a method using antiparkinsonian drugs claims to identify Parkinson's disease patients among members of the Mutuality Sociale Agricole in five districts in 2007 by developing, based on 1,114 antiparkinsonian drugs users, a predictive model and estimatingits performances (sensitivity = 92.5%, specificity = 86.4%, c-statistic = 0.953). Based on thismodel, we estimate that the prevalence of Parkinson's disease in the five districts is of 6.20 ‰after 18 years and 2.76 ‰ after standardization on the age- and sex-distribution of the 2007 French population. The prevalence is 1.3 times higher in cantons where the density of farms specialized in orchards and other permanent crops is highest; this activity is characterized by intensive use of pesticides, especially insecticides. Detailed information on professional useof pesticides were collected in a case-control study (331 cases, 660 controls). We observed anassociation between Parkinson's disease and intensive use (high number of applications peryear) of fungicides and insecticides. Among different types of farms, an association with Parkinson's disease is only found for pesticide use in vineyards. Finally, the association with occupational exposure to pesticides seems more pronounced for the clinical presentation of the disease characterized by the presence of resting tremor.
