Prevalence of depression in PD is estimated to range from 7% to 76%. The variation is largely attributed to the diversity of the populations under study, differences in the definition of depression, and the fact that some studies used point prevalence and other studies used monthly prevalence. Also, the prevalence of depression varies with fluctuations of cognitive status and other comorbiditie...

Psychotic symptoms are common in drug treated patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Visual hallucinations occur in about 30% and delusions, typically paranoid in nature, occur in about 5%. These problems, particularly the delusions, cause great distress for patient and caregivers, and are among the most important precipitants for nursing home placement. Psychotic symptoms carry a poor prognos...

Preliminary evidence suggests that daytime sleepiness may predate clinical diagnosis of Parkinson disease. The authors examined daytime napping and nighttime sleeping durations, reported in 1996–1997 by 220,934 US NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study participants, in relation to Parkinson disease diagnoses at 3 clinical stages: established (cases diagnosed before 1995, n 1⁄4 267), recent (1995–1999, ...

Parkinson disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease with unknown etiology. PD is commonly referred to as a “motor disease,” reflecting its clinical symptoms, including resting tremors of extremities, muscular rigidity, shuffling gait, stoop posture, and bradykinesia (1). The underlying pathology of PD is progressive neuronal loss, particularly in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc...

Knowledge discovery in databases has established its success rate in various prominent fields such as e-business, marketing, retail and medical. Medical data mining has great potency for exploring the out of sight patterns in the respective medical data sets. This paper intends to provide a survey of current techniques of knowledge discovery in databases using data mining techniques that are in...

OBJECTIVES To review the molecular genetics and functional biology of leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) in parkinsonism and to summarize the opportunities and challenges to develop interventions for Parkinson disease (PD) based on this genetic insight. DATA SOURCES Publications cited are focused on LRRK2 biology between 2004 and March 2009. STUDY SELECTION Literature selected was based o...

Neurology 2012;79:616–618 Caffeine, the world’s most widely used psychomotor stimulant, potentiates the antiparkinsonian effects of levodopa in preclinical models, as noted nearly 40 years ago.1 The findings prompted early placebo-controlled crossover studies of caffeine as an adjunct to levodopa or a dopamine agonist in Parkinson disease (PD).2,3 No motor effect of caffeine was demonstrated ot...

5 Interactions of stroke, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and APOE status in dementia risk 7 ␣-Synuclein gene duplications in sporadic Parkinson disease Jessie Theuns and Christine Van Broeckhoven ARTICLES 9 Joint effect of stroke and APOE 4 on dementia risk: The Canadian Study of Health and Aging 43 ␣-Synuclein gene duplication is present in sporadic Parkinson disease