The following is a summary of “Incidence of Parkinson’s disease in Germany based on prevalence data from 70 million patients of the statutory health insurance,” published in the June 2024 issue of Neurology by Wattenbach et al.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a brain disorder that attacks both movement and mood control.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study to estimate the age—and sex-specific incidence of PD in Germany. They employed an illness-death model and a corresponding partial differential equation (PDE) informed by prevalence and mortality data.
They estimated the age- and sex-specific incidence of PD in Germany based on a PDE describing an illness-death model. Prevalence rates (2010 to 2019) were sourced from the Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance (Zi). The PD mortality rates were extrapolated using population data from Norway. Incidence was estimated using bootstrapping (median of 5000 samples), with 95% CI used to assess accuracy.
The results showed that men had higher PD incidences than women across all age groups. The highest incidences (median of 5000 bootstrap samples) occurred at age 85, with 538.49 cases per 100,000 person-years (py) in men and 284.09 per 100,000 py in women. The widening 95% CI with increasing age indicated greater uncertainty in the estimation.
Investigators concluded that the illness-death model and corresponding PDE effectively estimated the incidence of PD as a chronic illness, reducing overestimation bias and yielding more accurate rates for further analysis.
Source: bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-024-03739-4
