Objectives In most countries, the burden of neurological disorders is shown to increase. One explanation is the increase in life expectancy, especially for neurodegenerative ones. Environmental factors, including chemicals such as pesticides may also explain this Public Health issue. Several epidemiological studies have shown pesticide exposure in farmers was associated with neurodegenerative diseases. The strongest evidence concerns Parkinson’s disease, but there are also data for Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In addition, several studies have suggested that farmers had higher depression and suicide rates than the general population, which could be explained by several factors like remote residence, long working days, time pressure, economic stressors. Pesticides are also suspected as some of them disturb neurotransmitters implicated in mood, like serotonin and dopamine.

Methods In AGRICOH, there are opportunities to further study the occurrence of neurological diseases in relation with agricultural exposures. A first step has been taken by describing mortality from neurodegenerative diseases and suicide in the 4 cohorts who collected this type of data: the Agricultural Health Study in US (N= 51,502, 1999–2015), the AGRICAN cohort in France (N=181,842, 2005–2015), the Prospective Investigation of Pesticide Applicators’ Health Study in UK (N=4,944 participants, 2013–2016) and the Korean Multicenter Cancer Cohort study (N=8,428 participants; 1993–2013). Standardized mortality ratios were calculated according to gender and countries.

Results In these first analyses, no excess in neurodegenerative mortality in males and females was observed in the four cohorts. However, suicide mortality was significantly increased in French, British and Korean females (SMR=1.46; 23; 1.66, respectively) and in French males (SMR=1.13, 1.03–1.25) compared to the general population.

Conclusion Possibilities to go further on neurological diseases in AGRICOH, exploring possibilities to get incidence data, to combine data from additional cohorts, to include metrics for pesticide exposures in the analysis will be discussed during this symposium.