Heart failure in Parkinson's disease: analysis of the United States medicare current beneficiary survey.

OBJECTIVE

We sought to examine the prevalence of heart failure in elderly PD versus non-PD patients using a national sample of Medicare beneficiaries in the United States.

SCOPE: The prevalence of heart failure in elderly PD patients was 2.27 times that of non-PD patients (19.4% versus 8.7%, 95% CI = 1.43-3.60, p 0.0005), and remained twice as high after excluding patients with stroke and possible vascular parkinsonism.

CONCLUSIONS

In this cross-sectional study of a national Medicare database, heart failure occurred twice as frequently in elderly PD patients as in non-PD patients. Prospective studies are warranted to verify these findings.