Objective: To evaluate recent mortality trends in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) between the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) per national healthcare reporting systems.

Background: PD demands high quality, integrated care delivery systems.  The USA and the UK healthcare systems have long been points of comparison for differences in accessibility, efficiency, and best practices.  There is a paucity of research directly comparing PD outcomes between the two countries. Comparing PD mortality trends in the USA and the UK offers insight into impact of differing healthcare delivery models on PD care.  We started with evaluating each country’s respective PD mortality data to see if their national data sets could be used for country-to-country comparison.

Method: We evaluated each country’s nationally reported, publicly available PD mortality data. The USA uses the CDC National Center for Health Statistics’ (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System and the UK uses the Office of National Statistics (ONS). We evaluated availability of data for the past 5 years (2018-2022).

Results: The NCHS reported mortality data between 2018-2022 while the ONS reported data between 2018-2020. NCHS reported mortality as annual age adjusted death rates while the ONS reported mortality as annual total number of deaths. Both countries stratified their data by gender, 5 years age groups, and state (USA) or region (UK). Both countries classified cause of death by the ICD-10 code G20. The NCHS reported PD mortality from death certificates in which PD was primary cause of death, while the ONS reported PD mortality based on PD as primary or contributory cause of death.

Conclusion: The mortality data bases were not comparable between the two countries. There was variation in death attribution with PD for measuring PD mortality.  While the UK data represent a uniform model of care, the National Healthcare Service (NHS), the USA is a heterogenous mixture of health systems.  Our next step will be focusing on two comparable systems within each country: Kaiser Permanente and NHS England.  Similar comparisons for health care delivery evaluation have been performed previously[1] but not for PD.

References: [1] Ham C, York N, Sutch S, Shaw R. Hospital bed utilisation in the NHS, Kaiser Permanente, and the US Medicare programme: analysis of routine data BMJ 2003; 327 :1257 doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7426.1257

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/a-comparison-of-national-data-on-parkinsons-disease-mortality-between-the-usa-and-uk/