The incidence of Parkinson’s disease in the United States will exceed 1.2 million by 2030, according to new estimates published Tuesday in the journal npj Parkinson’s Disease.
The number of people who have the disease will be 930,000 in two years, according to the researchers, and it will increase to 1,238,000 in 2030, based on the U.S. Census Bureau population projections.
The Parkinson’s Foundation said the new estimate is almost double the previous one, arrived at in 1978, because it draws from larger and more diverse populations.
“These findings will help attract the attention of federal and state government as well as the pharmaceutical industry to the growing need and urgency in addressing Parkinson’s disease,” said James Beck, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for the Parkinson’s Foundation. He was a contributing author on the study.
The paper also confirms that men are more likely than women to have Parkinson’s and that the number of people who have the disease increases with age, regardless of sex.
States with the highest prevalence of the disease, the Parkinson’s Foundation said, include California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. States with the lower prevalence include Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.
The Parkinson’s Prevalence Project was begun in 2014 by the Parkinson’s Foundation. Its second phase is expected to begin later this year with the goal of better understanding, on a national scale, how many people receive diagnoses each year as well as the rate of mortality of people with the disease.
