Why do people with Parkinson’s disease experience anxiety and depression?

  Parkinson’s is a disease of the elderly that can affect their normal activities and lives. Many people do not know how the disease manifests itself in the early stages of the disease, so it is easy to ignore some of its pre-existing manifestations. How do you know that you are suffering from Parkinson’s?  The symptoms of Parkinson’s are dyskinesia, tremor and muscle rigidity, but Parkinson’s disease patients are often accompanied by emotional disorders, including anxiety or depression.  Patients with Parkinson’s disease suffer from anxiety or depression for the following three reasons: brain tissue damage directly leads to neuroendocrine changes, neurological deficits, and cognitive impairment; patients suffer from functional disability, pain, or disrupted rhythms of life after the disease, causing damage to self-esteem and thus symptoms such as emotional instability, irritability, insomnia, and nervousness; patients have neurological disorders before the disease or individual psychological defects before the disease, with sensitivity, suspiciousness, The patient has pre-morbid neurosis or pre-morbid individual psychological deficits, such as sensitivity, suspiciousness, blame seeking, self-centeredness, etc.  About 40% of patients with Parkinson’s disease have anxiety symptoms, which manifest as mental and physical anxiety. Patients often feel inexplicable fear, dread, nervousness and anxiety, often fidgeting, restlessness, rubbing their hands and feet, pacing around, making small movements, and not being able to concentrate, and they do not know why they are so frightened. In severe cases, people may feel that some kind of disaster is coming, or even that they are dying.  Thirty to 40 percent of people with Parkinson’s disease have depressive symptoms. Patients become often sad, depressed, indifferent to what is going on around them, irritable, prone to crying, feeling poor health, having more discomfort, etc. Due to the aggravation of dyskinesia, the patient has difficulty in performing previously familiar tasks, which decreases the quality of life and increases the psychological burden, which leads to and aggravates depression. Depression, in turn, can exacerbate the patient’s dyskinesia.  Anxiety or depression may be an inherent symptom of Parkinson’s disease. Notably, the presence of anxiety or depression does not necessarily correlate with the progression of Parkinson’s disease, and a significant proportion of patients have anxiety or depressive symptoms early on. Some patients with anxiety or depression will develop Parkinson’s disease in the following years.  Along with medication, patients with Parkinson’s disease should increase their self-confidence, relax themselves, stay optimistic, shift their attention, get enough sleep, exercise more, and develop personal hobbies. In normal life, whenever you feel you have symptoms of Parkinson’s, you should go to the hospital for examination, and people with Parkinson’s disease should also go to the hospital for regular checkups.