Ed 
People who lived within one mile of a golf course had 2.26 times the odds of a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis compared to people who lived more than six miles away. That’s from a case-control study published in JAMA Network Open in May 2025 by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the Barrow Neurological Institute.
So lets talk about it.
I’d rather you get this from me, sitting down with the actual numbers in front of you, than from a Facebook group at 11pm the week before you close on a house in Spanish Oaks. (You know the post I mean. All caps, no link to the study, four hundred comments, nobody has read anything.) So I went and read the whole study, and then I read the people who think it’s wrong, and I’m linking all of it below so you can do the same and land wherever you land.
What the golf course Parkinson’s study actually found
The researchers pulled from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, which is a medical records system covering 27 counties in southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, and they compared 419 people diagnosed with Parkinson’s against 5,113 people without it, across 139 golf courses, going back from 2015 all the way to 1991.
Start with distance. Inside one mile of a course the adjusted odds ratio came in at 2.26 against people living six-plus miles out, and once you get past three miles, each additional mile knocks the odds down about 13%.
Then there’s the water, which is the part that got skipped in just about every headline I saw. People whose drinking water came from a groundwater service area with a golf course sitting inside it had roughly double the odds compared to people drawing from a groundwater area with no course in it. And where the ground underneath lets contaminants move around easily, the odds ran 82% higher than in places that had a course but tougher rock to get through.
Read those three together and the water starts looking like the more interesting half of this thing.
What the study did not find
It did not find that golf courses cause Parkinson’s. It found an association, and the researchers are the first ones to say so.
And nobody measured a pesticide. Not in the groundwater, not in the air, not in one single person in the study. Pesticide exposure is the explanation the researchers offer for why the pattern might be sitting there, it is not something they went out and found.
There’s a timing problem on top of that. David Dexter at Parkinson’s UK said, in comments quoted by ScienceAlert, “Parkinson’s starts in the brain 10 to 15 years before diagnosis, and the study didn’t only use subjects who permanently lived in the area.” The addresses in this study came from a couple years before symptoms showed up, which is nowhere near the stretch of time when the disease was quietly getting started. That same writeup points out the study never tested for groundwater contamination near the courses, never tested the air, and didn’t properly control for other sources of urban air pollution, like the stuff kicked up by road traffic.
The study also can’t pull its own two threads apart, because as the researchers note, 90% of the people living within three miles of a course also lived inside a groundwater service area, so proximity and water supply are sitting right on top of each other in the data.
The Parkinson’s Foundation said it cleaner than I can: “this study does not prove cause and effect, and the investigators emphasize that more work is needed before drawing firm conclusions.” The American Parkinson Disease Association lands in the same spot, and adds that the study didn’t account for occupation, head trauma, or genetics. Even the golf superintendents association put out its own FAQ, pointing out that the course boundaries came from one single year, 2013, and then got applied backward to cases going all the way to 1991. (Read that one too. It is about as self-interested as a source gets and it still makes a fair point, which is sort of the whole spirit of this post.)
Why you’re seeing this everywhere in 2026
Ok so why is a study from May 2025 all over your feed right now? Because two other things landed on top of it.
In January 2026, UCLA Health published research in Molecular Neurodegeneration linking long-term residential exposure to a pesticide called chlorpyrifos with more than 2.5 times the Parkinson’s risk, across 829 people with the disease and 824 without. And they didn’t stop at the statistics, they went into the lab, and senior author Dr. Jeff Bronstein said in UCLA’s announcement, “By showing the biological mechanism in animal models, we’ve demonstrated that this association is likely causal.”
That’s a much bigger swing than the golf study takes. It’s also about one specific chemical the EPA banned for residential use back in 2001, and that study has nothing to do with golf courses.
Meanwhile the paraquat litigation keeps grinding along, with more than 8,000 US lawsuits filed by people who say the weed killer caused their Parkinson’s, and The New Lede reported that Syngenta settled a Philadelphia case in January 2026 on the eve of what would have been the first bellwether trial. Syngenta and Chevron, a defendant in the broader litigation as paraquat’s former distributor, deny liability.
Three different stories, one news cycle, all of them about pesticides and Parkinson’s, and your brain does what brains do. Kahneman’s whole thing is that we judge how likely something is by how easy it is to call an example to mind, so three headlines in six months and it quietly files itself as settled. It isn’t. Two of the three aren’t even about golf courses.
What I’d go find out if I were buying in a golf community
I know what you’re thinking, which is fine, just tell me whether I should worry about this or not. I can’t do that. But I can tell you what I’d actually go find out, and it’s a short list.
Read the research yourself. Every link up there goes to a primary source or a Parkinson’s organization, not somebody’s hot take, and twenty minutes with them will put you ahead of whoever wrote the headline you saw.
Find out where the drinking water actually comes from. Going off what the study found, this is the whole ballgame, and it’s an address-level question rather than a neighborhood one. Out here you’ll find city water, municipal utility districts, water supply corporations, and private wells, sometimes on the same road. I’m not going to sit here and tell you what any particular Austin golf community’s water source is, because I’d be guessing, and a guess from me is worth about what you paid for it. Ask the seller, ask the HOA, then go verify it with the utility that actually serves the address and get the answer in writing.
If you’re on a well, look at testing and filtration. The APDA suggests looking into a home water filtration system. Dr. Isaac Goldszer at Henry Ford Health goes a step further and says if you’re on well water, or you find out you’re in a vulnerable groundwater area, you might want to start filtering or buying your drinking water. Cheap peace of mind either way.
Ask the superintendent about the program. Integrated pest management, application schedule, buffers around the water. A good superintendent will talk your ear off about this stuff, and if you get a vague answer instead, that tells you something too.
Talk to your doctor about your actual risk, not your realtor. I know a fair amount about septic systems, MUD taxes, and which lots on a fairway are going to get pelted with golf balls (ask me how I know). I know essentially nothing about neurology and I’m not going to start pretending otherwise now.
My bottom line
The reason people buy in Falconhead, Spanish Oaks, Barton Creek, and out around Lakeway hasn’t changed. Open space that stays open, a walkable neighborhood, a view nobody can put a two story house in front of. All still true this morning.
So no, I’m not telling you to cross golf communities off your list, and I’d argue nobody who has actually read the study would tell you that either. What I am telling you is that a group of serious researchers found a pattern worth chasing, the strongest part of it points at drinking water, and that puts one more line on your due diligence, sitting right next to the survey and the septic inspection. It’s a phone call. That’s not that hard right.
Frequently Asked Questions
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I’d rather you buy with your eyes open than buy fast. So if you’re looking anywhere from Bee Cave to Lakeway to Barton Creek, and you want help getting real answers on water, HOA, and all the other stuff nobody puts in the listing, reach out or get in touch with our team at (512) 366-3270. Our complete guide to Austin area golf communities covers the rest of it. Lets grab coffee and go through the specifics.
Be safe, be good, and be nice to people.
