What is Parkinson’s disease?

  Parkinson’s disease is a chronic degenerative disease of the nervous system. With the aging of the population, the increasing brain load, and the increasing per capita life expectancy, social phenomena are becoming increasingly evident; although it does not significantly shorten the life expectancy of patients, the disease severely limits the mobility of patients and affects the quality of life, coupled with the long course of the disease and high disability rate, bringing a serious burden to patients, families and society. At present, the clinical diagnosis of this disease mainly depends on its typical clinical manifestations, and the accuracy of its clinical diagnosis is about 80%, there are still many misdiagnosis and patients are already in the middle and late stage when the diagnosis is made, and the disease is in an irreversible state. Although PET and SPECT are recognized for early diagnosis of PD, they are expensive and difficult to carry out. In order to give PD patients a good prognosis, early diagnosis for PD patients is very important.  Based on previous studies, this study is the first in China to propose a combination of PD motor and non-motor symptom scales to screen patients with early Parkinson’s disease, while refining early motor symptoms for easy clinical observation, so as to achieve early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment and delay the progression of the disease. In this study, the stepwise acute levodopa loading test was added to the scale examination to further differentiate PD from non-PD Parkinson’s syndrome with its ability to correctly evaluate patients’ dopaminergic responsiveness and make early screening more accurate.  This study allows the development of a screening scale that is highly correlated with the early clinical diagnosis of PD, which will contribute to the early clinical diagnosis of PD patients, provide a platform for intervention in PD patients, and make it possible to provide prevention for the development of PD in the future.