Thank you to one of our readers, John, for your question about predicting life expectancy for Parkinson’s disease patients. There is no hard and fast answer that applies to everyone. Thanks to the new clinical guidelines developed by the American Academy of Neurology, we can pass along sciences fairly good answer. Studies convince us that PWPs that tend to have shorter life expectancies are patients that:
Are diagnosed at an older age..
Experience dementia.
Are less responsive to dopamine therapy.
On the contrary, PD progresses more slowly in patients whose first symptom is tremor. They also respond better to dopamine therapy.
Besides trying to predict life expectancy, you may be interested to know about predicting how rapidly motor symptoms and cognitive abilities decline, as well as your seceptability to dementia.
Motor Symptom Decline
People whose motor symptoms worsen rapidly tend to:
Be diagnosed at an older age (over the age of 78)
Experience more Rigidity/hypokinesia (muscle stiffness and slowness).
The jury is still out about wether or not, having other illnesses in addition to PD, having posturaly instability and/or gait disorders, or being male tends to cause motor symptoms to decline.
Cognitive Decline and Dementia
If you are older at the age of onset, you also have a higher risk for earlier development of cognitive decline and dementia. Muscle stiffness and slowness are also risk factors.
One major weekness is that we do not have any predictive statistics. The information that I read does not tell me the odds of a PWP developing dementia, or the odds of a 5 or ten year life expectancy. I with I had more to offer.
If you would like to read more about predicting the progress of Parkinson’s disease, I strongly encourage you to follow
this link to the patient summary of the new clinical guideline on the prognosis of PD. If you are really in the mood for some heavy reading, please
click here to access the clinical guidelines for health care practitioners.
