Capturing Physical Activity, Symptom Presence, and Severity in People with Parkinson Disease in Real-time: A Pilot Study

Research Objectives: To determine the relationship between the severity of non-motor symptoms (pain, fatigue, depression, and cognitive difficulty) and physical activity (PA) in patients with Parkinson’s Disease (pwPD).

Design: Participants were screened for eligibility and signed consent forms. Participants were given a CamNTech Pro-Diary-V sensor, which is a watch sensor worn around the rise to collect physical activity data and ecological momentary analysis. Fifteen pwPD completed seven days of remote PA monitoring (via accelerometer) while simultaneously rating presence and severity of non-motor symptoms five times per day.

Setting: Participants were able to take their sensors home and do daily activities while wearing it.

Participants: The target population was adults with Parkinson’s Disease who were between stages 1-4 in disease severity according to the Hoehn and Yahr scale. The target sample size was 20 participants to determine feasibility, but only 15 completed the entire study for data collection. Demographic information and disease severity was collected using their respective tests.

Interventions: Due to the observational nature of this study, no intervention was performed.

Main Outcome Measures: Significant correlations (p ≤ 0.05) were found between increased fatigue and increased age (rs=0.611), increased cognitive difficulty (rs=0.576) and increased pain (rs=0.604). Additionally, increased age was significantly correlated (p ≤ 0.05) with increased levels of pain (rs=0.537), between increased cognitive difficulty and increased levels of depression (rs=0.557), and with increased self-report PA with decreased severity of depression were found.

Results: No statistically significant correlations were found between self-reported real time non-motor symptoms and self-reported or measured PA. This is consistent with previous findings indicating that self-reported PA is often higher than measured PA. We did not find correlations between measured PA and any of the included non-motor symptoms of PD which is not consistent with previous findings of higher levels of PA being associated with improved quality of life, lower levels of pain, better mood, and lower levels of fatigue.

Conclusions: While the presence of non-motor symptoms was not found to be related to measured PA in pwPD, the presence of non-motor symptoms was found to be correlated with other non-motor symptoms. Further research is indicated for determining associations between non-motor symptoms and quality of life in pwPD. Measured PA was not found to be correlated with non-motor symptoms with participants with Parkinson’s Disease. There were minor concerns that the sensor pertained to comfortability, but the sensors were acceptable and safe to use by participants.

Author(s) Disclosures: No conflicts of interest to disclose.