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Published on: January 15, 2010
Prevalence of Parkinson's disease: a population-based study in Portugal
J J Ferreira1,2,3,4, N Gonçalves1, A Valadas1
1Clinical Pharmacology Unit, Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Lisbon.
Background And Purpose:
Portugal has been identified as one of the countries with a high prevalence of LRRK2-G2019S, considered to be the most frequent known cause of familial and sporadic Parkinson's disease (PD). The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of PD in Portugal using a door-to-door methodology.
Methods:
A cross-sectional study was conducted in the Portuguese community-dwelling population; that is, elderly people living in the community on their own, aged ≥50 years and resident in mainland Portugal, in two phases: (i) a questionnaire was applied to screen potential cases of PD; and (ii) screened cases were evaluated by an expert in PD to confirm diagnosis.
Results:
The adjusted prevalence of PD for the Portuguese community-dwelling population aged ≥50 years was 0.24%. The estimated total number of cases of PD for the Portuguese population is 180/100 000 inhabitants.
Conclusions:
The results of this study show that a geographical region with a high frequency of a causal mutation for PD does not automatically imply a high prevalence of patients with PD.
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