Yeah last I checked rises in various kinds of dementia and things like Parkinson’s have been tagged to our aging population. And the root causes have been found to be primarily genetic.
Rises are in lock step with age demographics and the proportion for each form/disease within the block. Like say in the total number of cases, the same percentage are parkinson’s, alzheimer’s etc.
Yet we seem to get a different supposed environmental suspect every 6 months.
I think it’s just boomers hitting the age where they’re suddenly very aware of these issues and dealing with them regularly.
That’s a very big population block, and as they age into certain concerns it tends to drive a huge amount of attention. Kind of like how financial media shifted from entirely about how to save and pay for your kid’s college, to how to save and pay for retirement over the last decade or so.
If you look at certain kinds of media with the right eye you’ll notice a lot of that. Discussion of dental implants as better than dentures. Lots of talk about knee, hip and shoulder replacement. Supermarket tabloids shifting from Natalie Woods and Dick Van Dyke to Burt Reynolds and JFK Junior.