July 1, 2024 – Being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder later in life may mean up to a doubled risk of also getting Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease is a nervous system disorder that often starts slowly with a mild tremor, but can progress to impair movement, speech, and balance. There is no cure, but medicines can help treat the symptoms.
The latest findings from researchers in London were limited to people newly diagnosed with anxiety starting at age 50 or older, since the researchers did not look back at anxiety diagnoses earlier in life. The typical time between a new anxiety diagnosis and a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis was just under 5 years, according to the study published last week in the British Journal of General Practice.
The researchers analyzed health records for people who visited primary care clinics in the United Kingdom from 2008 to 2018, all of whom were at least 50 years old. People were considered to be newly diagnosed with anxiety if they didn’t have an anxiety condition listed in their health records for an entire year before a provider documented an anxiety condition. The analysis included health data for more than 870,000 people who did not have a record of an anxiety disorder during the study period, as well as data for nearly 110,000 people who were newly diagnosed with anxiety.
Anxiety conditions include generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias, and separation anxiety. While anxiety is usually diagnosed earlier in life, the researchers noted that prior studies have shown older people with anxiety often also report problems with memory and thinking skills.
The heightened risk of Parkinson’s disease among older people newly diagnosed with anxiety lasted even after the researchers adjusted their analysis for things including age, lifestyle, and having another mental illness.
The new analysis also lined up with already established risk factors for Parkinson’s disease, such as being male or having depression, fatigue, problems with thinking skills, low blood pressure, tremor, rigidity, balance problems, constipation, or sleep problems like sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, and insomnia.
“By understanding that anxiety and the mentioned features are linked to a higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease over the age of 50, we hope that we may be able to detect the condition earlier and help patients get the treatment they need,” researcher Juan Bazo Alvarez, PhD, of University College London, said in a news release.
An estimated 1 million people in the U.S. are living with Parkinson’s disease, and 90,000 people are diagnosed each year, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation. Most cases are diagnosed when people are age 50 or older, but 4% of diagnoses are made in people under 50 years old. Men are 1.5 times more likely than women to be diagnosed with the condition.
Parkinson’s disease is caused by the breakdown or death of nerve cells in the brain called neurons that produce a chemical called dopamine. Lack of dopamine in people with Parkinson’s disease leads to irregular brain activity, and while the cause is unknown, both genes and things in the environment are believed to play a role.
