New research shows that adults who develop anxiety for the first time later in life are more likely to go on to develop the neurodegenerative condition. People with anxiety have twice the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease compared with their non-anxious peers, according to a large new study in the United Kingdom. Researchers from University College London (UCL) used data for nearly 988,000 patients ages 50 and older from 2008 to 2018 to identify how anxiety affects Parkinson’s risk while accounting for other known factors such as age, sex, social isolation, severe mental illness, dementia, head trauma, and lifestyle.
They found that patients who were diagnosed with anxiety for the first time as older adults were twice as likely to go on to develop Parkinson’s – suggesting it could be an early warning sign of the neurodegenerative condition. That’s significant because doctors don’t always consider a patient’s history of anxiety when assessing them for Parkinson’s. The , for example, focuses on motor problems.
“It's not a hard-and-fast line, unfortunately, but that's why this research is really good, because it actually gives more justification for anxiety to be an early question,” Amelia Hursey, research manager at Parkinson's Europe, told Euronews Health. Among patients with anxiety in the study, a handful of symptoms were also associated with a higher Parkinson’s risk. These included depression, sleep problems, fatigue, cognitive impairment, low bl.
