2025 American Academy of Neurology Abstract Website

Objective:

Determine the differences in rates of Dementia/ Atypical Parkinsonism between Black and White Parkinson’s Disease patients.

Background:

Parkinson's associated dementia (PD-D) is a condition that dramatically affects someone’s quality of life. While Parkinson's Disease impacts roughly 700,000 in the US, approximately 300-350,000 of these patients will develop PD-D or some other type of Atypical Parkinsonism. The racial disparities between black and white PD-D patients are not extensively understood. The purpose of this study is to analyze the disparities in PD-D between White and Black Parkinson's Disease patients.

Design/Methods:

The Parkinson's Disease database (PD database) on REDCap was used to provide data for Dementia in Parkinson's Disease patients. A Chi-Square test analysis was performed in Excel to analyze the differences in rates of PD-D between Black and White Parkinson's Disease patients. A p-value was taken from the chi-square analysis with a 95% confidence interval. A relative risk analysis was used to compare both groups for increased risk factors. A p-value was taken from the analysis with a 95% confidence interval.

Results:

We were able to show that Black Parkinson's Disease patients had a significantly higher chance of having a PD-D than White Parkinson's Disease patients (p-value=0.03155). 7.8% of Black Parkinson's Disease patients from the dataset have some variation of PD-D. Only 3.8% of White Parkinson's Disease patients have some variation of PD-D. The relative risk ratio for PD-D in Black Parkinson's Disease patients was between one to four (95% CI), indicating that Black Parkinson's Disease patients are two times as likely to have PD-D than White Parkinson's Disease patients.

Conclusions:

These findings suggest that Black Parkinson's Disease patients are at a relatively higher risk of developing PD-D when compared to White Parkinson's Disease patients. This research may go on to show that Black Parkinson's Disease patients have more complicated cases of Parkinsonism than White patients.