New Study Suggests Anxiety May Double The Risk Of Parkinson’s Disease In People Over 50

A new study has suggested that people over 50 who experience worry may be up to twice as likely to acquire Parkinson’s disease than their anxiety-free counterparts. The British Journal of General Practice released the study, which examined primary care data from the country.

Researchers compared 109,435 adults 50 years of age and older who had been diagnosed with anxiety between 2008 and 2018 to a control group consisting of 987,691 individuals who were anxiety-free.

According to researchers, 331 study participants who had been diagnosed with anxiety went on to develop Parkinson’s disease over the course of a ten-year period. The typical patient who developed the disease did so 4.9 years after receiving their initial anxiety diagnosis.

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The odds of developing Parkinson’s disease were still twice as high for those with anxiety than for those without the diagnosis, even after controlling for age, lifestyle characteristics, mental illness, and other variables.

It was also more common for men and members of better socioeconomic categories to get the illness.

Parkinson’s disease was discovered to be connected with additional characteristics by the researchers. These were depression, sleep difficulties, exhaustion, cognitive impairment, low blood pressure, tremor, rigidity, impaired balance, and constipation. Parkinson’s disease was less common in people with erectile dysfunction, shoulder discomfort, and dizziness.

Anette Schrag, a professor of clinical neurosciences at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and the study’s co-leader, said, “Anxiety is not as well researched as other early indicators of Parkinson’s disease.”

Schrag suggested that more studies focus on anxiety in the hopes of improving treatment for Parkinson’s disease in its early phases.

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative ailment in the US, affecting up to one million people, however numbers vary and misdiagnosis is common, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

According to the organisation, the condition is most frequently diagnosed in adults 60 years of age and older, but up to 10% of cases are identified before this age, and early symptoms may go undetected.

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