Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, in collaboration with Alberto Ascherio at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, worked with the self-reported diet data from more than 40,000 health professionals, tracked since the mid-1980s. In the 2010s, the participants also answered questions about early non motor features associated with Parkinson’s.
They had a huge cohort, so they selected from the clinical literature those common prodromal features that are relatively easy to assess with just simple questions or inexpensive tests. One feature was acting out dreams, which they only asked of people who had a sleeping partner who could verify it. Another was hyposmia, or reduced sense of smell. For that, there was a scratch-and-sniff test that they mailed out for people to smell. And also intestinal constipation, a non-specific feature that can be significant when combined with other signs. They had a huge cohort, so they selected from the clinical literature those common prodromal features that are relatively easy to assess with just simple questions or inexpensive tests.
“Obviously when you look at these features one by one, they are very common, but the combination of three or more is present in only about 2 percent of older adults. We’ve found in past research that people with all three of these features are 23 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease.”
Comparing these data points, the team found that people who consumed about 11 servings of ultra-processed foods per day were 2.5 times likelier to develop early nonmotor features than people who consumed about two to three servings.
Parkinson’s disease really starts at least 10 to 15 years before the diagnosis. If you study individuals with diagnosed Parkinson’s disease, you’re really 15 years late. So they wanted to find out which factors may influence the development of Parkinson’s disease. For this purpose, they created this large cohort in which we assess the presence of what we call prodromal features of Parkinson’s disease, which occur many years before the typical signs and symptoms of the disease.
“Food processing has always been a necessity for preservation and shelf life, but we’re talking about something different with ultra-processed food. This is really an industrial process to make the food more attractive. It goes well beyond what is needed to preserve the food and is more related to the marketing and commercial aspects of the food industry,” explains Alberto Ascherio.
(Originally published around May of this year)
Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/05/do-ultra-processed-foods-increase-parkinsons-risk/
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