Study suggests connection between anxiety and Parkinson’s disease

People over 50 with anxiety may be up to twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease as their peers without anxiety, a new analysis suggests.

The study, published in the British Journal of General Practice, looked at primary care data from the United Kingdom. Researchers compared a group of 109,435 people 50 and older who were diagnosed with a first episode of anxiety between 2008 and 2018 with a control group of 987,691 people without anxiety.

Researchers said, of those in the study, 331 patients with an anxiety diagnosis developed Parkinson’s disease over the decade, and the average patient who developed the disease did so 4.9 years after their first anxiety diagnosis.

After adjusting for age, lifestyle factors, mental illness and other factors, people with anxiety were still twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those without an anxiety diagnosis. Those who developed the disease were also likelier to be male and in higher socioeconomic groups.

Other factors were associated with developing Parkinson’s disease: The researchers found that those who had depression, sleep disturbances, fatigue, cognitive impairment, low blood pressure, tremor, rigidity, balance impairment or constipation were likelier to develop the condition. Those with dizziness, shoulder pain and urinary and erectile problems were less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease.

“Anxiety is not as well researched as other early indicators of Parkinson’s disease,” Anette Schrag, a professor of clinical neurosciences at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and the study’s co-leader, said in a news release. Further research should home in on anxiety, she said, in the hopes of learning how to better treat Parkinson’s disease in its earliest stages.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Parkinson’s disease is the second-most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States and affects up to 1 million Americans, though counts vary and misdiagnosis is common. The disease is most commonly diagnosed in those 60 and older, the agency says, but up to 10 percent of people are diagnosed before age 50 and early signs can go unnoticed.