Document resource
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease usually diagnosed clinically but is not uncommonly misdiagnosed. A prodromal phase has been observed in clinical cohorts, we studied this phenomenon in pathologically confirmed PD donors.Medical notes were analysed retrospectively from 832 PD donors at the UK Parkinson’s Tissue Bank. In the first stage of these analyses, we aimed to identify the predominant symptoms preceding the clinical diagnosis of PD using a word cloud analysis.After excluding donors with <5 medical events and those with a clinical diagnosis of Parkinson’s plus syndrome, 719 were included in the analyses, with a mean of 16 events per donor. A word cloud generated from the medical notes spanning 5 years prior to the 2-year period before diagnosis revealed that ‘tremor’ is the most frequent term (score =1), followed by ‘pain’ (0.54) and ‘shoulder’ (0.39), and ‘osteoarthritis’ (0.25). The terms ‘sleep’, ‘anxiety’, and ‘depression’ were also in the topmost frequent.The prominence of these medical terms in the word cloud aligns with existing literature on prodromal PD. Future work will incorporate the use of machine learning on pathological metrics to analyse medical events to support disease diagnosis.natalie.man@nhs.net