Parkinson’s is one of the age-related brain diseases, that will impair your brain. It affects your daily activities like slowed movements, shivering, balance-related issues, and more. In most cases, the cause is unknown, but in certain cases, it may develop due to heredity. There are numerous treatment options available to treat this condition, also some behavioral changes in Parkinson’s patients affect them and the people around them, further this blog will shed light on the behavioral changes of Parkinson’s patients.
What is Parkinson’s disease?
In Parkinson’s disease, some areas of your brain will be impaired, and with time it will cause serious symptoms. This disease mainly affects your muscle control, movement, and balance, and further, it can also affect your senses, thinking ability, and mental health. At times, personality changes with Parkinson’s disease may also take place.
Notably, the actual cause of Parkinson’s disease is not found yet, but medical professionals believe that this disease can also develop due to both environmental and genetic factors. Also, the medications and therapies are the best treatment options for Parkinson’s disease, which will greatly assist you in managing the symptoms and also help to improve the quality of your life.
Usually, over age, individuals will develop this disease, and most commonly it will begin after the age of 60. Further, men and women given male birth are vulnerable to this disease when compared to women and the women assigned female birth. In some rare cases, this condition can affect young people too, when their parents have this condition.
How common is Parkinson’s disease?
Parkinson’s disease is one of the most common diseases because it is the second most common age-related degenerative brain disease. It is one of the motor symptoms, that is movement-related brain disease. Also, reports indicate that at least 1% of people develop this disease after the age of 60. So, just visit the best neurology hospital in Coimbatore for appropriate treatment.
As we mentioned above, Parkinson’s disease will impair the specific parts of the brain, and you will lose the ability of those areas once controlled. Usually, your brain will use neurotransmitter chemicals to manage how your brain cells communicate with each other. People with Parkinson’s disease lack dopamine, one of the crucial transmitters.
Simply, when your brain transfers activation signals that will tell your muscles to move, it regulates your movements by employing the cells that require dopamine. This is the reason why insufficient dopamine causes slowed movements and other symptoms.
Further, the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease will intensify the symptoms and will mainly affect how your brain functions, also causing depression and dementia-like symptoms.
What are the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease?
Losing muscle control is the primary symptom of Parkinson’s disease. Other common symptoms involved in diagnosing Parkinson’s disease include:
- Delayed Movements: Usually, people with this condition, complain that they have muscle weakness, but this issue arises due to muscle control issues, and there is no loss of strength.
- Muscle Shaking: About 80% of people with Parkinson’s disease experience this symptom, which is rhythmic shaking of muscles when at rest.
- Stiffness: The next common symptom of Parkinson’s disease is lead-pipe rigidity and cogwheel stiffness. While lead-pipe is a continual stiffness when moving certain body parts. On the other hand, cogwheel stiffness occurs when you combine shaking and lead-pipe rigidity.
- Improper Posture: The slow movements and stiffness of Parkinson’s disease cause a stooped stance and hunched over. You will experience this condition when your disease gets worse.
Some motor symptoms include:
- Less Blinking: Blinking less than usual is also a symptom of Parkinson’s disease, which is due to the reduced control of facial muscles.
- Drooling: This is the next symptom that arises due to loss of facial muscle control.
- Facial Expression: Hypomimia, that is mask-like facial expression. There will be fewer facial expressions or not at all.
- Trouble Swallowing: This will happen when there is less throat muscle control. It will also increase issues like choking and pneumonia.
What are the behavioral changes noticed in Parkinson’s patients?
Whenever you develop some disease, it is quite normal to face symptoms and certain changes, but in Parkinson’s disease , you will experience changes in your behavior. Further, let’s see some of the Parkinson’s disease behavioral changes:
1) Confusion and delirium:
Both confusion and delirium, are consciousness-related issues. In this case, individuals will be less aware of the environment and, based on the cause, highly agitated, or drowsy and sluggish. There are two extremes, like being less alert and being overly alert. Further, their thinking capacity will become slow and inappropriate. Even they will find it difficult to recognize a question and answer for it. The speech will become slurred in Parkinson’s disease.
Even in certain cases, patients will be unaware of the day, and at times they are unable to say their names. Usually, delirium develops after a new or sudden physical issue or also can be a result of drugs you consume, notably in aged people. When delirium is diagnosed at the correct time and treated, it can be resolved, so this condition requires immediate medical attention.
2) Delusion:
Delusion is nothing but having a fake belief despite evidence to the contrary. Some delusions may arise due to false statements of the actual perceptions and experiences. Even in extreme cases, some people think that even the song lyrics or newspaper articles indicate some message, which only refers to them.
In some cases of Parkinson’s disease, the patient’s beliefs seem true, and also it is hard to find it is a delusion because they might happen in real life. While certain kinds of delusions can be easily found, for instance, in religious delusion patients think that they are god.
3) Disorganized Speech:
Disorganized speech is nothing but speech that doesn’t contain any anticipated logical connections between question and answer or between thoughts. For instance, in Parkinson’s disease, patients may suddenly shift from one topic to the next, not even finishing a thought. At times, the topics may be related and will be completely different most of the time.
In a few cases, patients reply to ordinary questions with long, unrelated answers, and completely unwanted details. Those answers may seem logical but will be entirely irrelevant. However, these types of speech largely differ from difficulty expressing or understanding language or framing words that are caused by brain diseases like stroke.
4) Disorganized Behavior:
Disorganized behavior means doing completely unusual things in public, like shouting or promising for unnecessary reasons. Usually, performing normal daily activities will be a challenging task for people with disorganized behavior. Right from maintaining good personal hygiene to obtaining a portion of food, everything will become difficult with Parkinson’s disease.
5) Hallucinations:
Hallucinations are nothing but feeling, seeing, hearing, or tasting something that is not actually there. That people just think something, that is not caused by an outside stimulus. Notably, any of the senses can be involved, but the most commonly felt hallucination is hearing something mostly like voices. Those voices often make offensive commands or force them to do something is also the behavioral change of Parkinson’s disease. To potentially cure this condition, reach out to a Parkinson disease doctors in Coimbatore.
Often as a part of behavioral changes, patients will face mood extremes. Certain actions like outbursts of rage, extreme elation, depression, and conversely constant expression will come under mood extremes.
Bottom Line:
Parkinson’s patients face a range of behavioral changes and that will potentially affect their quality of life. Often these changes include mood disorders like depression and anxiety, cognitive impairments, and alternations in personality and social behavior. Understanding these behavioral symptoms is vital for offering comprehensive care, as they can worsen the physical symptoms and disturb the overall well-being of patients. To effectively manage this condition, patients need to take multiple approaches like, following medical treatment correctly, psychological support, and social interventions.
