A recent 10 year study of general practice patients in the UK indicates that a new diagnosis of anxiety may be an early predictor of Parkinson’s Disease. The researchers looked at almost 1,000,000 different files and found that those people over 50 who were newly diagnosed with anxiety were twice as likely to also be diagnosed with PD within a 5 year period. Which makes me wonder whether those early symptoms all of our loved one’s show might be the cause of the anxiety?

In my husband’s case, we knew something was going wrong for several years prior to his official PD diagnosis, but his primary care doctor kept calling it “just a tremor”. He didn’t become anxious but was curious as to why this supposed tremor kept getting worse and was impacting more of his body. The same thing happened with my father 40 years ago. At that time his PCP simply said, “I should have seen this sooner.” Will this new information help general physicians understand the potential for PD better and recognize what they are looking at when it first presents itself?

I am not sure that an earlier diagnosis would have made big a difference for us. It would have been nice to have an answer and perhaps get treatment in place sooner. When my husband finally was referred to a neurologist, the specialist took one look and asked how long he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. He was surprised to learn that my husband hadn’t. During the next 20 minutes that changed our lives forever, he was diagnosed, given a prescription for carbidopa levodopa and sent on his way.

My loving husband still doesn’t present with anxiety, I tend to be the more anxious of the two of us. After reading about these findings, I just hope that my anxiety is tied to his diagnosis of PD and not an upcoming one of my own.

This study can be found online at Risk of Parkinson’s disease in people aged ≥50 years with new-onset anxiety: a retrospective cohort study in UK primary care.