Stanford PD Community Blog

The Parkinson’s Foundation published a new article in the December issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety titled “Protecting Parkinson’s Patients: Hospital Care Standards to Avoid Preventable Harm.” The article identifies sustainable solutions to improve care in the hospital for people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and details how these solutions may be generalized to develop a practical, disease-agnostic care model for all hospital and health systems that wish to avoid preventable harm. 

There’s still a lot we don’t know about how Parkinson’s disease develops. But one lifestyle intervention already has strong evidence behind it.

The number of people living with Parkinson’s disease globally has doubled in the past 25 years. Yet the treatment and monitoring of the neurological disease seems many decades behind. Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have developed a simple, portable device to help patients track their symptoms at home.

The most common factors are in the home

Among people over 65 years of age, falls are the primary cause of serious injuries and accidental death — everything from broken bones to traumatic brain injury. Statistically, if you’ve fallen once, your chances of falling again rise by a factor of two.

Researchers found that people with upper gastrointestinal conditions were far more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease later in life