Objective: The study was carried out to assess the prevalence of pain, nature of pain, quality of life and correlation of pain with quality of life (QoL) in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients.

Background: Pain is an important and distressing non-motor symptom in PD but frequently overlooked even by experts. Pain in PD is also reported to be associated with reduced health-related QoL, but there are contrary reports also refuting any association between the two. There have been very few studies on this aspect and probably none from India.

Methods: This cross sectional study was carried out at Movement disorder clinic, Department of Neurology, PGIMER & Dr. RML Hospital, New Delhi. 100 patients of PD diagnosed on the basis of UK Brain Bank criteria, were recruited after written informed consent. Disease severity was staged by Unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale (UPDRS) III, V and VI. Pain was assessed by King’s Parkinson Disease Pain Scale (KPPS) and quality of life by Parkinson’s disease questionnare-8 (PDQ-8).

Results: Mean age was 62.7 years with age range of 38-85 years. Men-women ratio was 73 : 27. Mean ± S.D. of UPDRS III score was 15.01 ± 7.55, while the values for UPDRS V and UPDRS VI were 2.39 ± 0.72 and 79.57 ± 18.70 respectively. Total 70 subjects showed pain scores on KPSS of which, 47 patients had musculoskeletal pain , 13 chronic pain, 35 fluctuation related pain, 27 nocturnal pain, 12 orofacial pain, 11 discoloration, and17 radicular pain. Mean ± S.D. of PDQ-8 scores of total population, those having pain (70 subjects) and those not having pain (30 subjects) were 7.09 ± 5.55, 8.71 ± 5.30 and 3.30 ± 4.10 respectively. The PDQ-8 scores were significantly high (worse QoL) in subjects with high KPSS scores (p-value = 0.0295). Mean PDQ-8 score was significantly higher (worse QoL) in the group having pain as compared to the group not having any pain with a p-value of < 0.0001. On linear regression KPSS scores correlated positively with PDQ-8 scores in those with pain (correlation coefficient r = 0.6447).

Conclusions: Majority of PD patients (70 %) had one or more types of pain symptoms which adversely affected their quality of life.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/assessment-of-pain-and-its-correlation-with-quality-of-life-in-parkinsons-disease/