AID Parkinson’s Disease Patients: Decreasing psychological stress associated with the recent diagnosis of PD

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a movement disorder that affects the nervous system. Its symptoms occur due to low dopamine levels in the brain. Symptoms tend to worsen over time, but the disease progression can vary among patients. Thus, the unexpected nature of PD is associated with a decline in mental health. Such disease uncertainties raise questions of what the future may hold for these patients in terms of disease diagnosis, prognosis, treatment outcome, functional decline, and how it may adversely affect their career. Thus, patients become apprehensive and anxious about the future. We found three gaps and problems in our in-depth search for the root cause of heightened psychological stress of recently diagnosed PD patients. The problems are diagnostic uncertainties of the disease, prognostic uncertainties, and uncertainty of treatment outcomes. The next problem is prognostic uncertainties related to the uncertainty these patients may have regarding the accumulative damage their unique disease progression may yield – whether that damage be personal, professional, or social difficulties. Among these problems, we chose to focus on prognostic uncertainties as our main problem to the possibility of further exploration of this problem, possible interventions, and resulting tangible outcomes.