‘Distressing dreams’ could predict Parkinson’s disease risk

‘And there’s been studies in Parkinson’s disease patients which have shown that dream changes tend to correlate with worse performance on frontal lobe tests. And there’s one study that actually identified that patients who had frequent distressing dreams tended to have more atrophy in the right frontal lobe.’So, I suspect that distressing dreams are signs of early degeneration of right frontal brain areas in Parkinson’s. This is quite speculative but that’s my suspicion.’Although the study has a few limitations, such as only including men, Doctor Otaiku believes that the new study could help to provide people with an early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.He added: ‘So, we know that Parkinson’s patients who are in the prodromal [early] phase tend to have a range of symptoms such as depression or constipation or sleepiness which tend to precede Parkinson’s disease by a number of years but most of these symptoms are quite non specific, so if someone has constipation it’s unlikely that they will get Parkinson’s disease, similarly [sic] for depression.READ MORE: Heart attack symptoms can feel so ‘mild or brief’ – 80% of people missing the subtle signs