In 2018, researchers from Oxford and other prestigious universities in the UK discovered distinct subtypes of Parkinson’s disease by finding different cognitive function declines for each subtype. The subjects of this study were predominantly white patients who were diagnosed with Parkinson’s between 2010 and 2016. In order to distinguish patients from each other and place them into different subtypes, they were evaluated in motor, non-motor, and cognitive domains as their Parkinson’s progressed. In addition, the patients’ response to levodopa, a drug to help ease the symptoms of Parkinson’s, was taken into account when creating different subtypes. The explanatory variable was the motor/cognitive declines for each patient, while the response variable was which Parkinson’s disease subtype they were clustered into afterwards, as that depends on what type and how much motor and cognitive decline each patient gets.
Results and Discussion
The researchers discovered 4 subtypes of Parkinson’s disease: fast motor progression, mild motor and non-motor disease, severe motor disease, and slow motor progression. The different types of Parkinson’s differentiate based on how fast a person’s motor abilities in each of the subtypes deteriorates, and from what aspects. Some of the advantages of the British researchers’ findings were that it identified different subtypes of Parkinson’s to be analyzed in the future, and provided findings regarding the different responses to levodopa across the 4 subtypes. However, the research did not identify the reasons for these differences, and finding the reasons for the development of a certain subtype would facilitate one’s ability to identify the progression of the disease.
APA Format Citation: Lawton, M. (2018, July 25). Developing and validating Parkinson’s disease subtypes and their motor and cognitive progression. Retrieved October 11, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6288789/
