Essay About Parkinsons Disease Patients And End Of The Eight-Year Study

Parkinson Disease
Essay Preview: Parkinson Disease
Report this essay
Parkinsons disease patients with dementia can lose their mental abilities at almost the same rate as people with Alzheimers disease, say Norwegian researchers.Parkinsons disease belongs to a group of conditions called movement disorders. Symptoms of Parkinsons disease include tremors, rigidity, and imbalance. Symptoms vary from person to person, and not everyone is affected by all of the symptoms.Not all people with Parkinsons disease have dementia. However, dementia isnt unusual with Parkinsons disease, although it may take a decade to appear after Parkinsons begins. Parkinsons disease occurs when brain cells that produce the chemical dopamine die. As a result, dopamine levels drop, garbling the brains movement signals to the body.Parkinsons is usually diagnosed in people aged 50 or older (though it can occur in adults as young as 30). Advanced age is also the main risk factor for dementia. Alzheimers disease is the most common cause of dementia.The latest study on Parkinsons and dementia comes from scientists including Dag Aarsland, MD, PhD, of the geriatric psychiatry department at Norways Central Hospital of Roagland. Aarsland and colleagues studied 129 Parkinsons patients who did not have dementia when they joined the study.Participants took tests measuring thinking and memory skills three times: at their initial visit, and four and eight years later. They were screened by a neurologist, a geriatric psychiatrist, and a research nurse.All participants lost at least some of their mental abilities over the years. But those with dementia had a steeper decline.At the second visit, four years into the study, 49 patients were diagnosed with dementia. By the end of the eight-year study, 36 participants still did not have dementia. Participants were then about 73 years old, having had Parkinsons for around 16 years, on average.Patients without dementia lost little ground. Their average mental exam scores dropped about one point per year, on average. Thats about the same as healthy people, say the researchers.”Forty-three percent of those who survived the eight-year study had no significant decline on the [tests] during the eight-year follow-up period,” they write in the December issue of Archives of Neurology.Those with dementia werent as fortunate. Their test scores dropped an average of 2.3 points per year. Researchers say this rate of decline