Environmental exposure to pesticides and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in the South of Spain.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To determine if there is a relationship between environmental exposure to pesticides and the prevalence of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in Andalusia. METHOD: We carried out a case-control study using the logistic regression method to verify the relationship between the prevalence of ALS in the area exposed to pesticides versus the unexposed area, through the Odds Ratio statistical test. RESULTS: The study population consisted of 519 individuals diagnosed with ALS between January 2016 and December 2018 according to the CMBD (Minimum Basic Data Set) as cases. In the control group, we have 8,384,083 individuals obtained from data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE). The Odds Ratio (OR) was used as a measure of association between cases and controls, obtaining an OR between 0.76 and 1.08 for the confidence interval of the CI (95%). CONCLUSIONS: Despite the existence of various studies that suggest a possible association between environmental exposure to pesticides and the risk of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, our analysis of the Andalusian population did not find significant evidence of this association.