Objective: To investigate the incidences and prevalences, and those male-to-female ratios of PD patients in Korea.

Background: The epidemiological studies of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are essential in understanding the basic characteristics of PD and important in making health policy. However, epidemiological studies are rather scarce in Asian countries including Korea. Epidemiological data also may differ depending on the methods employed in the study. About 99% of Koreans are covered by National Health insurance, which offers a chance to conduct epidemiological studies by big data analysis. So we investigated the PD incidences and prevalences, and those male-to-female ratios in Korea.

Methods: All claim data for the subjects who had ever been diagnosed under the code G20 between 2009 and 2013 were collected from National Health Insurance database. Exclusion criteria were 1) the code G20 was considered as ‘rule-out’; 2) the subject had ever diagnosed with Parkinson-plus syndrome; 3) a diagnosis was not confirmed by a neurologist. The incidence case was defined as who had not been ever diagnosed with PD in the previous years.

Results: The annual prevalence cases increased steadily and markedly over time from 59,821 in 2009 to 79,424 in 2013. The annual incidence cases also increased up to 21883 in 2013. The mean ages of the incidence cases were between 70.7 (in 2009) and 71.6 years (in 2013). The male-to-female ratio was consistently below 0.7.

Conclusions: Even considering the gap between the actual onset and the first visit, the age at onset should be higher than what has been known from hospital-based studies. Female preponderance over male in this study is in contradiction to the majority of previous studies. However, several Asian studies showed also similar female preponderance. Even in Asian studies showing male preponderance, the male-to-female ratio was not as high as that in Western studies. The ethnic and methodological differences in PD epidemiologic study should be considered. This abstract was accepted as a poster presentation at the 2017 IAPRD in Vietnam and was presented on November 12th, 2017.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/a-nationwide-epidemiological-study-of-parkinsons-disease-in-korea-using-national-health-insurance-database/