Palliative Care and Nonmotor Symptoms in Parkinson's Disease and Parkinsonism

The term palliative care (PC) is defined as a collection of interventions and strategies that helps to improve and sustain the quality of life of patients and caregivers in situations and scenarios associated with life-threatening illness. This is usually implemented by means of early identification and treatment of relevant motor and nonmotor issues such as pain, sleep, and autonomic dysfunction, dementia, and depression. In addition, a holistic PC program also includes delivery of physical, psychosocial, and spiritual support. PC as a specific discipline, as well as a treatment strategy for long-term neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease (PD), is relatively new, but very important as neurodegenerative disorders in the United Kingdom alone affects approximately 10 million people and there are over 130,000 people with PD. With longer life expectancy, the burden of long duration and late stage PD is even more evident, bringing in focus the need for PC. However, the concept of PC in PD is still poorly defined and although there are pockets of excellence, the strategy is poorly implemented into routine clinical practice. The variable progressive nature of the disease, the heterogeneity of clinical subtypes, and also the burden of nonmotor symptoms create challenges for effective PC delivery in PD, but recent clinical trials have started addressing PC in PD and are to be welcomed.