Savica R, Grossardt BR, Bower JH, Ahlskog JE, Boeve BF, Graff-Radford J, Rocca WA, Mielke MM. Survival and Causes of Death Among People With Clinically Diagnosed Synucleinopathies With Parkinsonism: A Population-Based Study. JAMA Neurol. 2017 Jul 1;74(7):839-846. PubMed.
Recommends
Please login to recommend the paper.
Comments
Erasmus MC University Medical Center
These data are critical for clinicians counselling parkinsonism patients and caregivers, as they provide them with robust life expectancy estimates for patients and may facilitate long-term care planning. Important strengths of this study are its population-based design as well as its rigorous case-detection and ascertainment methods, which are particularly impressive in view of the wide scale of the study. As a result, the study’s patient sample is generally representative of the broad spectrum of underlying causes and clinical severity of synucleinopathy-associated parkinsonism in the community, ensuring that its findings can largely be generalized to similar populations.
View all comments by Sirwan DarweeshUniversity of Pennsylvania
This is a very well-designed study and a strength is that they use a population-based approach with detailed clinical characterization of the patients identified from the medical record. The comparison of survival among different clinical phenotypes of synculeinopathies is new. It highlights the powerful effect of cognitive impairment and dementia to predict a poor prognosis across the PDD/DLB spectrum. Further, there is limited data on the natural history of MSA and this paper provides new insights into the relative rapid progression of this disease. Future prospective natural history studies following patients to autopsy will be important to define the neuropathological substrates that contribute to heterogeneity in survival on an individual patient level within each clinical phenotype.
View all comments by David IrwinMake a Comment
To make a comment you must login or register.