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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Richard Walker, Dr Annette Fisher
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Although respiratory tract infections can be a common complication in people with Parkinson's disease (PD), there is little published data on the nature of such infections in this patient group. We wished to investigate whether sputum samples were being taken from PD patients in order to establish whether an infection was present and if so which bacteria were responsible for the infection. We recorded the number of positive sputum samples taken from admission to North Tyneside General Hospital in North-East England across a ten-year period from June 2001 to June 2011. Of 643 in-patient episodes involving people with PD, positive sputum samples were recorded for only 12 episodes (1.9%) in eight patients. All patients were in early stage disease. In all admissions to the NHS Trust running the hospital, there were 23,069 sputum cultures from 1,056,693 in-patient episodes (2.2%). Our findings may reflect the difficultly of expectorating in many people with PD, particularly in late-stage disease. Since people with PD are especially vulnerable to respiratory tract infections, clinicians need to ensure that, where possible, a sputum sample is obtained from people with PD when clinically indicated.
Author(s): Walker RW, English J, Tan G, Fisher A, Gray AK
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Parkinson's Disease
Year: 2015
Print publication date: 22/01/2015
Acceptance date: 22/01/2015
Date deposited: 25/08/2015
ISSN (print): 2090-8083
ISSN (electronic): 2042-0080
Publisher: Hindawi Publishing Corporation
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/378967
DOI: 10.1155/2015/378967
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