Parkinson's Disease (PD) although still considered a paradigmatic movement disorder, it is associated with a wide range of non-motor symptoms. These include disorders of mood and affect with depression , apathy, anhedonia , cognitive dysfunction and hallucinations, as well as behavioural disorders which are complex. Sensory dysfunction with olfactory dysfunction or pain is almost present in all patients . There are also disturbances of sleep-wake cycle regulation like insomnia. Autonomic dysfunction including orthostatic hypotension, constipation and urogenital dysfunction is also present to some extent in a majority of patients.
In broad non-motor symptoms become increasingly prevalent with advancing disease, many of them can also precede the first occurrence of motor symptoms - most notably depression, olfactory dysfunction or rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) and constipation. Although exact clinico-pathological correlations for most of these non-motor features are still poorly understood, but it is consistent with the ascending hypothesis of PD pathology proposed by Braak and colleagues.
Screening these early non-motor features might, therefore, be one approach towards early 'preclinical' diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease and correlate with H & Y staging of Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease.
We studied 100 diagnosed cases of Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease and screened them for Non motor symptoms using Chaudhary et al non motor symptom questionnaire. We also correlated them with modified H&Y; staging for Parkinson’s Disease.
It was seen that there were many non-motor symptoms present in Parkinson’s disease among which depression, constipation, RBD, urinary dysfunction were common. It was also seen that some non motor symptoms preceded motor symptoms like olfactory dysfunction, depression and constipation. There is correlation with modified H&Y; staging, as the stage increases there are more non motor symptoms which affect the daily lifestyle of patient.