Incident Parkinson’s disease in kidney transplantation recipients: a nationwide population-based cohort study in Korea

This nation-wide population based retrospective cohort study evaluated risk of incident Parkinson’ disease in kidney transplant (KT) recipients in Korea. From Korean National Health Insurance Service database, we identified incident KT recipients aged ≥ 40 years without any history of Parkinson’s disease between 2007 and 2015. We established two control cohorts without a history of Parkinson’ disease: (1) General population (GP) cohort of insured subjects without a history of kidney disease, (2) end-stage renal disease (ESRD) cohort of incident ESRD subjects, with frequency matched for age, sex, and inclusion year. Parkinson’s disease data were obtained from baseline until December 2017. We followed 8372 KT recipients, ESRD patients, and GP for 45,723, 38,357, and 47,476 patient-years, respectively. Their mean age was 51.2 years and 60.1% were men. During follow-up period, 19 KT recipients, 53 ESRD patients, and 15 GP developed Parkinson’ disease. Risk of incident Parkinson’s disease in KT recipients was similar to that in GP (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 0.86, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.35 to 2.13, P = 0.75) and significantly lower than that in ESRD patients (adjusted HR 0.31, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.52, P < 0.001). Older age was the strongest predictor for incident Parkinson’s disease in KT recipients.