Objective: To examine potential sex differences in nonmotor symptoms (NMS) among drug-naive patients with Parkinson disease (PD), and to identify NMS that can best differentiate patients with early PD from controls.
Methods:Our cross-sectional analysis included 414 newly diagnosed, untreated patients with PD (269 men and 145 women) and 188 healthy controls (121 men and 67 women) in the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative Study. NMS were measured using well-validated instruments covering sleep, olfactory, neurobehavioral, autonomic, and neuropsychological domains.Results: Male and female patients with PD were fairly comparable on motor presentations but differed on several nonmotor features. Male patients with PD had significantly more pronounced deficits in olfaction (p 5 0.02) and in certain cognitive measurements (all p , 0.01) than female patients, whereas female cases experienced higher trait anxiety (p 5 0.02). Multiple stepwise logistic regression analysis showed that the combination of NMS measures-University of Penn- Conclusions: Our analysis revealed notable sex differences in several nonmotor features of patients with de novo PD. Furthermore, we found a parsimonious NMS combination that could effectively differentiate de novo cases from healthy controls. Nonmotor symptoms (NMS) are common among patients with Parkinson disease (PD) 1 and contribute greatly to poor quality of life, morbidity, and mortality.2,3 Despite their significant impacts, NMS among patients with PD remain poorly understood and, consequently, undertreated.2 Furthermore, some NMS, such as hyposmia, depression, REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), and constipation, may even precede PD clinical diagnosis by years.Clinical and epidemiologic studies have increasingly recognized and investigated the importance of NMS in understanding the natural history, etiology, and clinical care of PD.3,4 However, most previous studies of NMS used hospital-based prevalent PD cases, had small sample sizes, and often lacked a comparable control group. Although a few studies did assess NMS among patients with untreated, de novo PD, 5-8 most did not have sufficient sample size to evaluate potential sex differences [5][6][7] or focused executively on one or a limited number of specific