The prevalence of Parkinson's disease in Portugal

Abstract

Most of the epidemiological studies designed to determine the prevalence of Parkinson's disease (PD) in Portugal were hospital-based and the rates reported were around 1/1000. A sentinel network of general practitioners (GPs) has been in effect in the country since 1989, involving doctors with a relatively stable list of patients. This group of doctors notifies, every week, all the cases of certain selected diseases that may occur among the patients under their surveillance. On average, each doctor is responsible for 1500 to 1800 persons, of all ages and both sexes, whose main descriptive characteristics are known and updated every year. This led us to the idea of estimating the prevalence of Parkinson's disease in the community and to compare the estimated rates with hospital-based rates. One hundred and fifty general practitioners agreed to participate in a cross-sectional study which included a sample of 220,000 persons. The study took place between March and April 1992 and information on 291 PD patients was collected. Results show that among the study population, age-standardized rates were 1.4/1000 for males and 1.3/1000 for females. Sex-specific rates increase consistently with age in both sexes, reaching a level of 9/1000 in the oldest age group, '75 and more' years. These results estimate a higher prevalence of PD than was determined previously through hospital-based studies and allowed us to determine that patients aged 65 years and more are much likely to be followed by their own GP, either because the disease its already controlled and they are specifically seeking medication or because they find it difficult to attend neurology clinics.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Cost of Parkinson's disease in Europe

“…For example, the age categories are not homogenous. In particular, the highest age category varies significantly by study: from 75 years (Dias et al ., 1994), to 80 years (Schrag et al ., 2000), to 90 years (Tison et al ., 1994; Claveria et al ., 2002), and to 95 years (van de Vijver et al ., 2001). Several surveys found an increasing tendency with age (Sutcliffe et al ., 1985, Granieri et al ., 1991; de Rijk et al ., 1995; Schrag et al ., 2000; van de Vijver et al ., 2001; Claveria et al ., 2002), while others reported a peak at the age of 70 (or 75) to 79 years (D'Alessandro et al ., 1987; Kis et al ., 2002), followed by a decreased prevalence at ages over 80 years.…”

The Epidemiology of Parkinson’s Disease in an Australian Population

“…However, prevalence estimates are also susceptible to variation due to different sampling methods, non-uniform diagnostic criteria and study populations limited to the elderly. For example, in a prevalence report on PD from Portugal, Dias et al [17] observed considerable variation between hospital-based prevalence data and data from a network of general [18] suggested that variations in PD prevalence in different communities were due to differences in case ascertainment, life expectancy and length of survival with PD [18].…”

Prevalence, Duration and Severity of Parkinson's Disease in Germany: A Combined Meta-Analysis from Literature Data and Outpatient Samples

“…A sum of 11 studies reported prevalences in at least one of the age categories 65-74, 75-84, and ≥85 years [14,15,16,19,20,21,24,27,32,36,37]. Using only these studies in the meta-analysis, a pooled prevalence of 1,078.71/100,000 was estimated for the German population aged 65 years and above.…”

“…The systematic review comprised 44 studies estimating prevalence or incidence rates of PD of which 21 studies reported age- and gender-specific prevalence as well as the size of the underlying population [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. To supplement these data by studies that were published after 2004, an additional systematic literature search was performed using the same search strategy as described by von Campenhausen et al [10] (Fig.…”