For most of the twentieth century, living near a golf course was considered an amenity — quiet open space, mature trees, established neighborhood character. The 2025 JAMA Network Open study has not changed that, exactly. It has added a variable that any informed buyer in Belle Meade, Forest Hills, Hillwood, Sylvan Park, or any of Nashville's golf-adjacent neighborhoods should weigh against the other reasons they are considering the address.
§ I · The surface
A golf course is a heavily managed landscape. Tournament-grade fairways and greens require sustained application of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and fertilizers at rates that exceed almost any other land use category in the United States. U.S. courses apply pesticides at approximately fifteen times the rate of European courses, owing to climate, species selection, and the cosmetic standard of American course maintenance. The class of chemicals involved is broad — chlorothalonil, paraquat-related compounds, rotenone derivatives, neonicotinoids, organophosphates — with the exact mix varying by course, by season, and by regulatory cycle.
The exposure pathways for a nearby residence are two. Airborne drift occurs during and immediately after application; volatile and semi-volatile compounds disperse downwind from the treated turf and can reach residential properties within roughly a mile under typical wind conditions. Groundwater migration occurs over longer timescales; applied chemicals leach into the soil column, enter local groundwater, and travel downgradient regardless of wind direction. The two pathways operate independently. A property sitting upwind of a course is partially protected from airborne drift; it is not protected from the groundwater pathway.
§ II · The hidden layer
In May 2025, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute and the Mayo Clinic published a population-based case-control study in JAMA Network Open: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease (Krzyzanowski et al., 2025). The study analyzed 5,532 participants across two large epidemiological cohorts and examined the relationship between residential proximity to golf courses and the incidence of Parkinson's disease.
The headline finding is the adjusted odds ratio of 2.26 for participants living within one mile of a golf course, compared with participants living more than six miles away. Adjusting for age, sex, and other potential confounders, residents in the one-mile band had 126% higher odds of developing Parkinson's disease than the reference group. The 95% confidence interval did not cross 1.0, which in epidemiological terms means the finding is statistically significant. Elevated odds were also observed in the one-to-two-mile and two-to-three-mile bands, attenuating with distance.
Several chemicals routinely used in golf course maintenance have established links to Parkinson's pathology in independent laboratory and observational research. Paraquat, while banned for residential use in the United States, remains in agricultural and turf-management applications under specific licensing; it is the most heavily studied of the Parkinson's-linked pesticides. Rotenone and its derivatives have demonstrated dopaminergic neurotoxicity in animal models. The Krzyzanowski study does not establish chemical-by-chemical causation; it establishes the population-level statistical signal that proximity correlates with disease incidence.
What the study does not say is also important. It does not establish that any specific individual will develop Parkinson's disease as a result of living within a mile of a specific course. Epidemiology operates in populations and probabilities, not in individual fates. A 126% relative increase in a baseline population risk — Parkinson's affects roughly 1% of adults over sixty — produces a meaningful but still moderate absolute risk shift. The signal is real. The interpretation requires both halves of that sentence.
§ III · What the records show
Davidson County has an unusually dense golf-course geography. Within a ten-mile radius of downtown Nashville sit more than a dozen courses: Belle Meade Country Club, Hillwood Country Club, Richland Country Club, Bluegrass Yacht & Country Club, Hermitage Golf Course, the Vanderbilt Legends Club just south in Williamson County, and the seven public courses operated by Metro Nashville Parks: Percy Warner, Shelby, Ted Rhodes, Harpeth Hills, McCabe, Two Rivers, and VinnyLinks. Several Davidson County neighborhoods sit within one mile of multiple courses simultaneously — the Belle Meade and Forest Hills corridors most prominently, where Belle Meade Country Club to the northeast and Percy Warner to the northwest can produce overlapping proximity findings.
The Parcelscope methodology tracks both private courses (via OpenStreetMap polygon data) and public courses (via Metro Nashville Parks coordinates) for every address. For each course within three miles of a subject address, the report records the distance, the bearing, the relationship to local prevailing wind, and the course type. The score weights the one-mile proximity band most heavily, with attenuation through the two- and three-mile bands.
Two contextual notes are worth knowing. First, the JAMA study did not distinguish between public and private courses in its risk findings — both types apply pesticides, both maintain large turf areas, both present the same broad exposure pathways. Whether municipal procurement standards produce materially different chemical profiles is not established by the research. Second, the historical pesticide use at a given course matters as much as the current use. A century-old private club has accumulated decades of chemical application that may persist in soil and shallow groundwater regardless of contemporary practices.
§ IV · The bottom line
The JAMA 2025 finding does not say that a homebuyer should not purchase a property within a mile of a golf course. It says that proximity is now a documented variable in a residential risk assessment that includes schools, flood zones, walkability, commute, and a dozen other ordinary buying considerations. The variable was not on the public's radar in 2024. It is on the radar now.
For an address inside the one-mile band, three factors meaningfully modulate the exposure profile. First, wind direction: a home that sits downwind of the course on prevailing winds is exposed to less airborne drift than a home of equal distance upwind. Nashville's prevailing wind is southwest-to-northeast; courses to the southwest of a residence place that residence in the downwind exposure path during typical conditions. Second, elevation and groundwater gradient: a property hydraulically upgradient of a course is less exposed to the groundwater pathway than one downgradient. Third, course type and age: older private clubs with longer chemical histories carry different residual profiles than newer public courses with more recent maintenance regimes.
For an address within one mile of two courses simultaneously — a pattern that recurs in the Belle Meade and Forest Hills corridors — the cumulative exposure profile is meaningfully different from a single-course finding. This is the kind of geography that the aggregated proximity score reflects but that a buyer should understand in concrete terms before signing.
For everyone outside the three-mile band, the finding is informational only. The JAMA odds ratio does not extend meaningfully beyond three miles, and most Davidson County addresses are outside that radius. The presence of golf courses in the county is not a hazard for most properties; the question this chapter answers is the narrower one of which properties.
Read the full Krzyzanowski study at jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen (DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.9198). For a longer treatment of how this finding affects Nashville buyers specifically, see the Parcelscope journal entry, "The Golf Course Next Door."