Lack of Polysomnographic Non-REM Sleep Changes in Early Parkinson’s Disease

Background: Polysomnography (PSG) data are rare in patients who have early stage idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (IPD). Methods: Thirty-three patients who had IPD with a disease duration 3 years and 37 age-matched controls were recruited. PSG analysis was performed on current medication. Results: Patients with IPD had a reduced mean percentage of muscle atonia during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (80% vs 93%; P < 0.05). Total sleep time, sleep efficiency, indices/hour of arousals, awakenings, apnea/hypopnea, and periodic leg movements were similar in both groups. Age, but not dopaminergic medication, had a negative impact on sleep architecture in patients with IPD. There was no correlation between sleep efficiency assessed by PSG and sleep quality assessed by questionnaire. Conclusions: The results confirmed a reduction in muscle atonia during REM sleep as a characteristic finding in early IPD. However, there were no further disease-inherent or medication-induced changes in sleep architecture. Although sleep disturbances are considered to be an integral part of IPD, PSG cannot yet identify them objectively at an early stage. VC 2013 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Societ

Discriminative power of different nonmotor signs in early Parkinson's disease. A case-control study

The objective of this study was to evaluate the discriminative power of different nonmotor signs for early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD). Thirty patients with PD with <or=3 years of disease duration were compared with 30 healthy controls. Six deficit domains (DD) were defined: hyposmia, sleep abnormalities, dysautonomia, visual deficits, executive dysfunction, and depression. Plotting of Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and exact conditional logistic modeling, followed by manual stepwise descending procedure were used to identify a model for nonmotor signs that detects early PD. Patients with PD and controls did not differ in terms of age, gender, and educational level. Several DD discriminated patients with PD from healthy controls. Visual deficits showed the largest area under the ROC curve (0.83), followed by hyposmia (0.81) and dysautonomia (0.80). When combining the DD visual deficits and dysautonomia, the best residual model was obtained; it maximized both sensitivity and specificity for PD at a level of 0.77. At an early disease stage, several nonmotor domains were already able to discriminate patients with PD from healthy controls. Visual deficits had the best discriminatory power. Being brief and inexpensive, visual tests should be further investigated in larger cohorts as potential screening tool for early PD