Management of Anxiety in Parkinson's Disease

Anxiety is a common, distressing, hard-to-diagnose and hard-to-treat symptom in Parkinson's disease. No formal guidelines exist to assist management.

We provide a pragmatic guide to detecting and managing anxiety in Parkinson's disease.

In this educational review, we describe the phenomenology, diagnostic challenges, hypothesized neurobiology, and the rationale for treatments for anxiety in Parkinson's disease. We review the major drug-classes and non-pharmacological treatment approaches in current use. We also present a meta-analysis of pharmacological treatments of anxiety derived from previously published systematic reviews of RCTs for depression in Parkinson's disease in which anxiety was a secondary outcome.

In our meta-analysis, anxiolytic medications showed a moderate overall anxiolytic effect compared to placebo (standardized mean difference: -0.45 [95% CI: -0.78, -0.12], p = 0.02). There were significant limitations with the studies included in this meta-analysis, with studies generally having small cohort sizes, and each specific pharmacotherapy was not studied in more than one randomized control trial. We also describe a pragmatic algorithm for individualized pharmacological management, based on our own experience of selecting treatments to optimize side-effect profile and treatment of comorbid symptoms.

Detecting and treating anxiety likely benefits people with Parkinson's disease, though the current evidence-base for specific treatments or specific pharmacotherapy remains limited. Further work is needed to investigate the different evidence-based approaches for managing anxiety in Parkinson's disease.