Overview
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a serious chronic neurodegenerative disease with no cure that affects all aspects of daily living. It is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s disease, with an incidence forecast to double by 2050, primarily as a result of an ageing population. The gold standard of treatment, levodopa, has been widely available to patients since the 1960s, but some of the recently developed advanced therapies are still underused and inaccessible to many patients. While ongoing research has resulted in significant improvements in management, more is needed to delay, stop or even reverse PD.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a serious chronic neurodegenerative disease with no cure that affects all aspects of daily living. It is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s disease, with an incidence forecast to double by 2050, primarily as a result of an ageing population. The gold standard of treatment, levodopa, has been widely available to patients since the 1960s, but some of the recently developed advanced therapies are still underused and inaccessible to many patients. While ongoing research has resulted in significant improvements in management, more is needed to delay, stop or even reverse PD.
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Disclosure
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Correspondence
Seppo Kaakkola, Department of Neurology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, PO Box 302 (Haartmaninkatu 4), FIN-00029 HUS, Finland. E: seppo.kaakkola@hus.fi
Support
The V International Forum on Parkinson’s Disease (Helsinki, Finland, 6–7 May 2011) was funded by an unrestricted educational grant from Abbott. Abbott funded the development of this supplement by ESP Bioscience (Crowthorne, UK). Emily Chu and Nicole Meinel of ESP Bioscience provided medical writing and editorial support to the authors in the development of this publication. Abbott had the opportunity to review and comment on the publication’s content; however, all decisions regarding content were made by the authors.
Received
2013-06-22T00:00:00
