Severity of depressive and motor symptoms impacts quality of life in Parkinson’s disease patients at an academic movement clinic: A cross-sectional study

Introduction

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease with motor and non-motor manifestations that have been previously reported to affect patient quality of life (QoL). Our objective is to investigate the factors that contribute to QoL in a cohort of PD patients receiving care at a major academic institution.

Methods

In this cross-sectional study of 124 participants (71.77% male, mean age 65.20, mean UPDRS-III score 11.25), we analyzed if certain clinical features such as UPDRS-III, QIDS-C, and total disease duration contributed to QoL as measured by two different metrics (PDQ-39 and EQ-5D) in PD patients at a university Movement Disorders Clinic.

Results

Motor symptoms of PD, with the exception of tremor, as well as depression and specific depressive symptoms were significantly and positively correlated with lower QoL metrics for patients with Parkinson’s, with total depressive symptom severity (QIDS-C₁₆ Total score) contributing most to QoL scores. Of the specific depressive and motor symptoms, anhedonia and rigidity contributed the most to QoL. Disease duration was significantly correlated with lower QoL for participants with Parkinson’s according to the QoL metric PDQ-39 but not ED-5D. Parkinson’s patients with access to high-quality healthcare are at risk for having diminished QoL due to both depressive and motor symptoms.

Conclusion

While severity of motor symptoms certainly impacted QoL in our cohort, our findings suggest that depressive symptoms contribute more to impaired QoL than severe motor symptoms do. This phenomenon suggests that concomitant depression in PD as well as one’s psychological adjustment to disability may have a greater impact on QoL than severe motor symptoms.