Category: Epidemiology
Objective: We aimed to estimate the incidence of PD in patients with epilepsy and explore the association between epilepsy and PD.
Background: Although epilepsy is an uncommon comorbidity of Parkinson’s disease (PD), previous studies have indicated possible temporal associations between epilepsy and PD. However, the exact incidence of Parkinson’s disease among the patients with epilepsy is yet to be estimated as compared to those among the population without epilepsy.
Method: Epilepsy patients enrolled in the National Health Insurance Service Health Screening Cohort (NHIS-HealS) (2002-2013) between 2003 and 2007 were set up as the experimental group. The major outcome was the occurrence of PD. To avoid potential bias by confounders and selection bias between matched patients, we set the non-epilepsy group to patients whose characteristics were matched for the epilepsy group through Propensity Score Matching of ‘greedy nearest neighbor’ algorithm in 1:1 ratio. The Cox Proportional Hazards model was used to calculate PD incidence and hazard ratio (HR).
Results: A total of 10510 patients were finally included in the study, which contained 5255 patients in epilepsy and non-epilepsy groups, respectively. During the follow-up period, 85 patients with Parkinson’s disease among 5255 patients with epilepsy and 57 patients with Parkinson’s disease among 5255 patients without epilepsy occurred. The 10000 Person-Year (PY), representing the number of PD patients per 10,000 per year, was 21.38 in the epilepsy group and 11.18 in the non-epilepsy group. When all variables were adjusted, it was found that the epilepsy group had a 2.19 times significantly higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease than the control group (The adjusted HR: 2.19 (95% CI, 1.55-3.12)).
Conclusion: We confirmed an increased risk of PD in patients with epilepsy. However, further research is needed to prove an exact causal relationship between these two brain disorders.
To cite this abstract in AMA style:
YS. Hwang, MG. Kang, MG. Lee, SW. Yeom, BS. Shin, JS. Kim, HG. Kang. Estimating the Incidence of Parkinson’s Disease in Patients with Epilepsy: A Nationwide Cohort Study in South Korea [abstract]. Mov Disord. 2023; 38 (suppl 1). https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/estimating-the-incidence-of-parkinsons-disease-in-patients-with-epilepsy-a-nationwide-cohort-study-in-south-korea/. Accessed June 15, 2025.« Back to 2023 International Congress
MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/estimating-the-incidence-of-parkinsons-disease-in-patients-with-epilepsy-a-nationwide-cohort-study-in-south-korea/