PLAIN ENGLISH: Metabolic syndrome and risk of Parkinson disease: A nationwide cohort study

This is a really nice study which looks at the link between the 'metabolic syndrome' and Parkinson's. As the authors describe, the metabolic syndrome is a combination of things that increase the risk of heart disease (among other things) and earlier death... things like higher blood pressure and cholesterol, diabetes, and central obesity. 

The study shows a clear link between each of these things and risk of a future diagnosis of Parkinson's... this is interesting because it might mean that controlling blood pressure and diabetes etc in mid-life might lower risk of Parkinson's in the future.

The big advantages are the size of the study (more than 17 million people), which in turn is a large proportion of the entire population over the age of 40 in South Korea. Another big advantage is that there were relatively few exclusions from the study where data were missing for participants. Both of these facts guard against incorrect results.

However the disadvantages of the study centre on the fact that it does not adequately take account of reverse causation, that is, undiagnosed Parkinson's causing changes in blood pressure, and the risk of high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity. You have to remember that Parkinson's is 'clinical diagnosis' which means that it is made by an expert on the basis of the clinical examination findings. The doctors assessing these patients in routine healthcare settings were not looking for signs of Parkinson's specifically and therefore subtle signs could have easily been missed.

Parkinson's changes in the brain are likely to be happening 5, 10, 15 or more years before that diagnosis is eventually made. This means that event though the authors of this study excluded new case of Parkinson's within 4 years of finding of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity, that is probably not a sufficient amount of time. Increasingly sedentary lifestyle in the early and undiagnosed phase of Parkinson's could have resulted in an increased likelihood of some of these factors. 

It is also likely that people with increasing features of the 'metabolic syndrome' are at higher risk of death before they get diagnosed with Parkinson's, which in itself could have resulted in biased results. However, the authors took account of this in one of their analyses and even mentioned that they did this following a comment from someone who reviewed their paper. As a footnote, I have never seen this mentioned in a paper before (that a reviewer asked for something and the authors included it) even though it frequently happens. I think it is great! The peer review process for scientific papers often improves them (sometimes it doesn't !) and we should feel able to acknowledge improvements at every stage before publication...

- Alastair Noyce

Ga Eun Nam, Seon Mee Kim , Kyungdo Han, Nan Hee Kim, Hye Soo Chung, Jin Wook Kim, Byoungduck Han, Sung Jung Cho, Ji Hee Yu, Yong Gyu Park, Kyung Mook Choi  

PLOS Medicine

Published: August 21, 2018

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002640

Background

The association of metabolic syndrome (MetS) with the development of Parkinson disease (PD) is currently unclear. We sought to determine whether MetS and its components are associated with the risk of incident PD using large-scale cohort data for the whole South Korean population.

Methods and findings

Health checkup data of 17,163,560 individuals aged ≥40 years provided by the National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) of South Korea between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2012, were included, and participants were followed up until December 31, 2015. The mean follow-up duration was 5.3 years. The hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of PD were estimated using a Cox proportional hazards model adjusted for potential confounders. We identified 44,205 incident PD cases during follow-up. Individuals with MetS (n = 5,848,508) showed an increased risk of PD development compared with individuals without MetS (n = 11,315,052), even after adjusting for potential confounders including age, sex, smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, income, body mass index, estimated glomerular filtration rate, and history of stroke (model 3; HR, 95% CI: 1.24, 1.21–1.27). Each MetS component was positively associated with PD risk (HR, 95% CI: 1.13, 1.10–1.16 for abdominal obesity; 1.13, 1.10–1.15 for hypertriglyceridemia; 1.23, 1.20–1.25 for low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol; 1.05, 1.03–1.08 for high blood pressure; 1.21, 1.18–1.23 for hyperglycemia). PD incidence positively correlated with the number of MetS components (log-rank p < 0.001), and we observed a gradual increase in the HR for incident PD with increasing number of components (p < 0.001). A significant interaction between age and MetS on the risk of incident PD was observed (p for interaction < 0.001), and people aged ≥65 years old with MetS showed the highest HR of incident PD of all subgroups compared to those <65 years old without MetS (reference subgroup). Limitations of this study include the possibilities of misdiagnosis of PD and reverse causality.

Conclusions

Our population-based large-scale cohort study suggests that MetS and its components may be risk factors of PD development.

Kaplan–Meier curves of incidence probability of Parkinson disease (PD) for up to 7 years according to the number of metabolic syndrome (MetS) components.

Having an increased number of MetS components was associated with increased risk of PD development during the follow-up period compared to having no components (log-rank p < 0.001).

Comparing apples and apples

Drug trials (or trials of any new treatment for that matter) are designed by comparing a group on the new treatment against a group on something else. That may be no treatment, the best available treatment, or placebo (or dummy treatment). In order to make a fair comparison, it is essential to compare like with like.

An extreme example of this would be to say that “men are faster than women”, having compared the Jamaican mens olympic sprint team, against a selection of girls from the local secondary school. This is obviously ridiculous in so many ways: adult men vs teenage girls, trained atheletes vs untrained and so on…

In studies of Parkinson’s, it is also important that we compare like with like. For the past 50 years, researchers have used the “Hoehn and Yahr Scale” to create standardised definitions. (The scale is named after Margaret Hoehn and Melvin Yahr who pioneered research into progression and epidemiology of Parkinson’s in the 1960s.) Designed to give researchers a simple and global assessment of disease severity, this is probably the most widely used Parkinson’s staging system in use. According to the latest version of this scale there are 6 stages from 0= Asymptomatic to 5 = wheelchair bound or bedridden unless unaided.

Despite its widespread use, until now there have been no systematic attempts to prove how useful and reproducible it is. The researchers in this study assessed the acceptability, reproducibility, content and validity of the scale. They compared how different raters scored people (known as inter-rater reliability), and how that compared with other scoring systems of stiffness, tremor and other features of Parkinson’s. They also looked at whether the same assessor gave the same patient the same score at different times (known as test-retest reliability).

The good news is that inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability are incredibly high. In other words, if one clinician judges a person to have stage II, so will almost every other (trained) clinician. It also correlated quite well with other physical assessment scores.

As ever, it is not a perfect test. The difference between stages is not the same (in other words, going from I to II is not the same as going from III-IV). Nor does it correlate at all well with quality of life. It also does not take into account non-motor features of Parkinson’s. Furthermore, only 2.9% of more than 3000 participants were at the most advanced stage V, so may not be quite as reliable for these people.

In summary, we have a pretty good measure of giving a number to the amount that an individual is affected by Parkinson’s. Until we have a blood test/scan/marker of progression, this is the best we have, and we need to make sure we have ways of addressing its weaknesses. Using it we can compare like with like, and, hopefully, get ever closer to preventing people advancing through the scale.

RNR

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mds.27242/abstract;jsessionid=A596451DCF79B33BF34C1802EFD6E2CF.f04t03

Martinez-Martin P, Skorvanek M, Rojo-Abuin JM, Gregova Z, Stebbins GT, Goetz CG, et al. Validation study of the hoehn and yahr scale included in the MDS-UPDRS. Mov Disord. 2018 Jan 11;17:427. 

Progression in the LRRK2-Asssociated Parkinson Disease Population.

I think this is a really important study.

We have long suspected that patients with LRRK2-associated PD manifest Parkinson's in a different way to those that don't carry LRRK2 mutations. Here the authors show differences in the rate of progression of motor features – those with LRRK2-associated PD progress at a slower rate. This fits somewhat with notion that LRRK2 patients run a more benign course than 'regular PD' but what is at odds with this is that more of them had the postural instability gait disorder (PIGD) type of PD which is usually associated with a poor prognosis. The authors don't mention it much in the discussion but what is interesting to me is that the increase in PIGD type cases is not the result of a reduction in tremor-dominant cases, so much as a reduction in the indeterminate type. To me these observations lead to interesting questions:

1) Do LRRK2 patients fit into these two subtypes of PD better than those without LRRK2 mutations?? This is plausible because one would expect the pathology of LRRK2 to perhaps be less heterogeneous (even though a range of pathologies have been reported). 

2) Is there an imaging correlate for these different types in LRRK2 cases?

3) Does this tells us about the outcome measures we should be selecting for clinical trials in LRRK2 patients? And indeed,

4) Does it give us increased confidence that as a result of less heterogeneity (whether clinical or pathological) we would be more likely to detect an effect of a disease modifying therapy?

I was interested in the cognitive progression too. It fell short of nominal statistical significance but the MoCA is a relatively blunt tool for testing cognition and I expect that there would be differences in favour of slower progression in LRRK2 carriers if domains were studied more fully.

Important to exclude the GBA carriers in this work because they could bias the results, but there are other genetic factors that can influence seemingly monogenic forms of PD and should be kept in mind in future work.

- Alastair Noyce

JAMA Neurol. 2018 Jan 8. doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2017.4019. [Epub ahead of print]

Saunders-Pullman R, Mirelman A, Alcalay RN, Wang C, Ortega RA, Raymond D, Mejia-Santana H, Orbe-Reilly M, Johannes BA, Thaler A, Ozelius L, Orr-Urtreger A, Marder KS, Giladi N, Bressman SB; LRRK2 Ashkenazi Jewish Consortium.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstract/2668463?redirect=true

IMPORTANCE: Few prospective longitudinal studies have evaluated the progression of Parkinson disease (PD) in patients with the leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2 [OMIM 609007]) mutation. Knowledge about such progression will aid clinical trials.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether the longitudinal course of PD in patients with the LRRK2 mutation differs from the longitudinal course of PD in patients without the mutation.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A prospective comprehensive assessment of a large cohort of patients from 3 sites with LRRK2 PD or with nonmutation PD was conducted from July 21, 2009, to September 30, 2016. All patients of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with PD were approached at each site; approximately 80% agreed to an initial visit. A total of 545 patients of Ashkenazi Jewish descent with PD who had 1 to 4 study visits were evaluated. A total of 144 patients (26.4%) had the LRRK2 G2019S mutation. Patients with GBA (OMIM 606463) mutations were excluded from the analysis.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Linear mixed-effects models for longitudinal motor scores were used to examine the association of LRRK2 mutation status with the rate of change in Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale III scores using disease duration as the time scale, adjusting for sex, site, age, disease duration, cognitive score, and levodopa-equivalent dose at baseline. Mixed-effects models were used to assess change in cognition, as measured by Montreal Cognitive Assessment scores.

RESULTS: Among the 545 participants, 233 were women, 312 were men, and the mean (SD) age was 68.2 (9.1) years for participants with the LRRK2 mutation and 67.8 (10.7) years for those without it. Seventy-two of 144 participants with the LRRK2 mutation and 161 of 401 participants with no mutation were women. The estimate (SE) of the rate of change in the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale III motor score per year among those with the LRRK2 mutation (0.689 [0.192] points per year) was less than among those without the mutation (1.056 [0.187] points per year; difference, -0.367 [0.149] points per year; P = .02). The estimate (SE) of the difference in the rate of change of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment score between those with the LRRK2 mutation (-0.096 [0.090] points per year) and those without the mutation (-0.192 [0.102] points per year) did not reach statistical significance (difference, 0.097 [0.055] points per year; P = .08).

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Prospective longitudinal follow-up of patients with PD with or without the LRRK2 G2019S mutation supports data from a cross-sectional study and demonstrates a slower decline in motor Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale scores among those with LRRK2 G2019S-associated PD.

Autonomic dysfunction in Parkinson's disease: A prospective cohort study

The non motor symptoms of PD are so important. This study shows how autonomic dysfunction worsens significantly over short periods of follow up in patients that have a diagnosis of PD. We already know from other studies that autonomic dysfunction is a marker of Parkinson's disease severity and heralds a shorter survival of patients with PD. 

There has been quite a lot of focus on sleep, cognition and mood as non motor features of PD but we are not adequately addressing symptoms and consequences of autonomic dysfunction and studies such as this highlight the importance. Previously, marked autonomic involvement used to raise the suspicion of an alternative parkinsonian disease (such as multiple systems atrophy) and although autonomic dysfunction is a prominent feature of MSA, it is also very prevalent in PD. 

Of course autonomic dysfunction also often precedes a diagnosis of PD, whether in the form of orthostatic hypotension, or more commonly with constipation, erectile dysfunction or urinary symptoms. We at PREDICT-PD have a longstanding interest in how symptoms of autonomic dysfunction can be used to identify those that might one day go on to be diagnosed with PD...

Alastair Noyce

Mov Disord. 2017 Dec 26. doi: 10.1002/mds.27268. [Epub ahead of print]
Merola A1, Romagnolo A2, Rosso M1, Suri R1, Berndt Z1, Maule S3, Lopiano L2, Espay AJ1.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mds.27268/full

BACKGROUND: Dysautonomia is a frequent and disabling complication of PD, with an estimated prevalence of 30-40% and a significant impact on the quality of life.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the rate of progression of dysautonomia and, in particular, orthostatic hypotension, in a cohort of unselected PD patients, and assess the extent to which the progression of dysautonomia affects activities of daily living, health-related quality of life, and health care utilization in PD.

METHODS: We recruited 131 consecutive patients into a 12-month, prospective, observational cohort study. Clinical measures included the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society/UPDRS, the Scale for Outcomes in Parkinson Disease-Autonomic, the Orthostatic Hypotension Symptoms Assessment, and orthostatic blood pressure measurements. Health care utilization was quantified as the number of hospitalizations, emergency room visits, and outpatient clinic evaluations.

RESULTS: The overall severity of autonomic symptoms, as measured by the the Orthostatic Hypotension Symptoms Assessment total score, worsened by 20% over 12 months (P < 0.001), with an overall increase in orthostatic hypotension prevalence from 31.1% to 46.7% (P < 0.001). Worsening of autonomic symptoms was independently associated with deterioration in daily living activities (P = 0.021) and health-related quality of life (P = 0.025) adjusting for disease duration, cognitive impairment, and motor severity. Regardless of symptomatic status, orthostatic hypotension was associated with greater deterioration in daily living activities, health care utilization, and falls (P ≤ 0.009) compared to patients without orthostatic hypotension.

CONCLUSIONS: The severity of autonomic symptoms progressed by 20% over 1 year and was independently associated with impairments in daily living activities and health-related quality of life. Symptomatic and asymptomatic orthostatic hypotension were both associated with increased prevalence of falls and health care utilisation.

© 2017 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.