News Roundup: New and Noteworthy Information
Disease-specific and balance- and mobility-related measures can accurately predict which patients with Parkinson’s disease are at greater risk of falls, according to a study published online ahead of print June 23 in Neurology. In a study of 101 subjects with early-stage Parkinson’s disease, investigators administered a battery of neurologic and functional tests, including Tinetti, Berg, Timed Up and Go, Functional Reach, and the Physiological Profile Assessment of Falls Risk, which includes visual function, proprioception, strength, cutaneous sensitivity, reaction time, and postural sway assessments. In the six months following assessment, 48% of subjects reported at least one fall, while 24% of subjects reported more than one fall. The multivariate model revealed that the most accurate fall predictor was a combination of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale total score, total freezing of gait score, occurrence of symptomatic postural orthostasis, Tinetti total score, and extent of postural sway in the anterior-posterior direction.
A link between genetic variants, pesticide exposure, and Parkinson’s disease was reported in the June Archives of Neurology. Researchers tested for two ABCB1 polymorphisms associated with altered P-glycoprotein function in 207 subjects with Parkinson’s disease who were enrolled in the French health system for agricultural workers and 482 matched controls. Study participants also filled out questionnaires about their pesticide use, and subjects who used pesticides professionally were interviewed by an occupational health physician. Parkinson’s disease was not associated with the genetic variants in the full cohort; however, when separated by sex (101 male cases, 234 controls), investigators found a 3.5-fold higher incidence of organochlorine exposure in men with the variant G2677 (A, T) alleles. Among patients only, researchers noted an association between carrying two of the variant alleles and organochlorine exposure (odds ratio, 5.4), as well as with the cumulative lifetime number of hours of exposure.
Poststroke complications can shorten a patient’s optimum health span by about two years, per a study in the July 1 online Stroke. Using three-month outcome data from 1,233 patients with acute ischemic stroke in South Korea, researchers calculated the disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) loss from the stroke itself and then analyzed additional DALY lost from complications. Complications were reported in 34% of patients, with 20.8% of patients experiencing neurologic complications and 24.0% experiencing medical complications. The average DALY lost due to index stroke was 3.82. Patients with one complication lost an additional 1.52 DALY, while those with two or more complications lost an additional 2.69 DALY. “DALY analysis quantifies the burden of poststroke complications with a uniform metric potentially useful for healthy system planners,” the researchers stated.
—Rebecca K. Abma
