Association between Parkinson's Disease and Diabetes in a Case-Control Study

Parkinson???s disease (PD) and diabetes are two growing global public health concerns that are seemingly unrelated. There may be an association between these two diseases; however, epidemiological studies have been inconsistent in their findings. This case-control study aims to assess the association between PD and diabetes by comparing PD patients with non-PD controls using data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Each case was age- and gender-matched using a 1-to-3 ratio of cases to controls for a total of 43 PD cases and 129 controls. Among this population, the odds of having diabetes was 1.60 (odds ratio (OR) = 1.60, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.60, 4.26]) times higher in PD patients than in controls, but the relative odds was not statistically significant. Although there was no statistically significant association between PD and diabetes in this particular population, it is important to continue to collect data on people with PD to measure associated comorbidities