Abstract
Air pollution has been associated with Parkinson's Disease (PD) risk, although this relationship remains unclear. We estimated yearly levels of exposure to ten air pollutants (period 2006-2018) in an Italian population cohort, the Moli-sani study (N = 24,325; ≥35 years; 51.9% women), and derived three principal components, testing their associations with incident PD risk over 23,841 participants (213 cases, median(IQR) follow-up 11.2(2.0) years). This revealed a statistically significant association of PC1 (explaining 38.2% of common variance, tagging PM10 levels), independent on sociodemographic, professional and lifestyles covariates (Hazard Ratio [95%CI] = 1.04[1.02-1.07]). The association was confirmed testing average PM10 levels during follow-up (18[13-24]% increase of PD risk per 1 μg/m(3) increase of PM10). Among different circulating markers, lipoprotein a explained a significant proportion of this association (2.8[0.9; 8.4]%). These findings suggest PM10 as a target to lower PD risk at the population level and a potential implication of lipoprotein a in PD etiology.