Prevalence and Relationship of Rest Tremor and Action Tremor in Parkinson’s Disease
AbstractBackgroundDespite the significance of tremor in Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis, classification, and patient’s quality of life, there is a relative lack of data on prevalence and relationship of different tremor types in PD.MethodsThe presence of rest tremor (RT) and action tremor (AT; defined as combination of both postural and kinetic tremor) was determined and RT severity was defined using the Movement Disorders Society Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) at baseline in the Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI, n=423), the Fox Investigation for New Discovery of Biomarkers (BioFIND, n=118) and the Parkinson’s Disease Biomarkers Program (PDBP, n=873) cohorts.ResultsAcross baseline data of all three cohorts, RT prevalence (58.2%) was higher than AT prevalence (39.0%). Patients with RT had significantly higher (Chi-square test, p<0.05) prevalence of AT compared to patients without RT in the PPMI (40.0% versus 30.1%), BioFIND (48.0% versus 40.0%) and PDBP (49.9% versus 21.0%) cohorts. Furthermore, patients with AT had significantly (Student t-test, p<0.05) higher RT severity that those without AT in PPMI (5.7 ± 5.4 versus 3.9 ± 3.3), BioFIND, 6.4 ± 6.3 versus 3.8 ± 4.4) and PDBP (6.4 ± 6.6 versus 3.7 ± 4.4) cohorts.DiscussionThe RT is the most frequent tremor type and present in more than half of the PD patients. However, AT is also present in nearly one-third of the PD patients. Our results also indicate that RT and AT may have cross-interactions in PD.