PD Stages

Often we ask our medical professionals what stage of a condition we may be in. This can be extra difficult to classify for Parkinson's patients because the symptoms can look so different and unique for each person. It is also important to note that one may fluctuate between stages as medications and therapies improve current situations. Additionally, rarely can stage prediction be made for progression because a person may stay in a certain stage for years and other stages for months. It is also important to remember that every journey with PD is unique. Because a symptom might be listed within a stage, it doesn't necessarily mean a person with PD will experience that symptom.

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Joseph H. Friedman, MD writes, "Staging most disease is important in predicting how long people will live or how well they can function. This is not true for staging in PD. Severity of PD is currently not really measurable. As physicians, we currently rate different aspects of PD differently and often use multiple different scales. It affects people in so many different ways that it defies methods for comparison, just as it has been impossible to measure what we mean when we say disease progression. We have good methods for measuring the motor symptoms of PD. The severity of your own PD is really a matter of how severely it affects your life. A number can never capture this."

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At the PAA, we recommend not getting too hung up on what stage classification of Parkinson's you may be in. However, for the purposes of education, we are including the breakdown of stages as presented by the Davis Phinney Foundation in their manual, "Every Victory Counts."