New research uncovered two early signs and risk factors for Parkinson’s.

Hearing loss and epilepsy are two early risk factors of Parkinson’s, according to pioneering new research from Queen Mary University of London, published today in JAMA Neurology. 

Queen Mary University researchers looked at electronic records from more than a million people who lived in East London between 1990 and 2018. They looked at early symptoms and risk factors for Parkinson’s.

Known symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, such as tremor and memory issues, might emerge up to ten and five years before diagnosis, according to the study. They also discovered two novel early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease: epilepsy and hearing loss, which they were able to duplicate using data from the UK Biobank.

While early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease have been recorded in the past, these studies have mostly concentrated on affluent white populations, with patients from minority ethnic groups and those living in high-social-deprivation areas largely under-represented in Parkinson’s research to date. For the first time, data from such a diverse and poor metropolitan population was used to provide additional evidence of risk factors and early indications of Parkinson’s disease.

Conditions like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes were found to enhance the risk of Parkinson’s in East London. In this cohort, the researchers discovered a stronger link between memory complaints than previously thought.

East London has one of the greatest proportions of Black, South Asian, and mixed/other ethnic groupings in the UK, with 45 percent of residents belonging to these groups, compared to 14 percent in the rest of the country. It also has some of the greatest levels of deprivation in the UK, with 80 percent of the patients in the study coming from low-income families.

“Our results uncovered novel risk factors and early symptoms: epilepsy and hearing loss. Whilst previous research has hinted at the association, such as epilepsy being more prevalent in Parkinson’s patients than in the general population, more research is now needed for us to fully understand the relationship. In the meantime, it’s important that primary care practitioners are aware of these links and understand how early the symptoms of Parkinson’s can appear, so that patients can get a timely diagnosis and doctors can act early to help manage the condition,” says lead study author Dr. Cristina Simonet.

“This study confirms that many of the symptoms and early features of Parkinson’s can occur long before a diagnosis. Through our ongoing PREDICT-PD research, we’re hoping to identify people at high risk of Parkinson’s even before obvious symptoms appear – which means that we could do more than just improve quality of life for patients, and perhaps be in the position to slow down or cure Parkinson’s in the future,” adds Dr. Alastair Noyce, another author of the study.

Source: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2022.0003

Image Credit: Getty

You were reading: Hearing loss could be an early warning sign of Parkinson’s – warns new study