More than 160,000 French people suffer from Parkinson’s disease, a pathology which is characterized by the destruction of certain neurons in the brain and by the accumulation of toxic clusters for nerve cells. It is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in France after Alzheimer’s disease: each year, 25,000 new cases are diagnosed.
According to some scientific studies, signs would “predict” the occurrence of this pathology. Thus, according to a recent study carried out by the University of Birmingham (in England), people who regularly have nightmares have an increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease with age.
Please note, this is not aboutinterpret a nightmare with spiders, the dream where you fall from a building or the one where you helplessly witness the death of a loved one. The researchers have analyzed the link between the recurrence of nightmares and the risk of seeing the development of Parkinson’s disease.
A diagnosis of Parkinson’s that occurs approximately within 5 years
To reach this conclusion, the British researchers followed a group of 3,818 volunteers, American men aged 67 and over, for 12 years. At the end of this period, 91 cases of Parkinson’s were diagnosed.
Verdict? According to the scientists (who published their work in the specialist journal eClinicalMedicine), men who have nightmares or “bad dreams” more than once a week would have a twice as high risk of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease within 5 years.
The first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease include akinesia (that is to say: slowness in the execution of movements, abnormally slow walking for example), hypertonia (this is a hyper-rigidity of the limbs) and tremors (at rest, in particular).
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