LAUSR

Reported prevalence of Parkinson’s disease (PD) varies significantly among countries. To date, little information has been gathered from Eastern Europe. Crude prevalence rate (CPR) of PD (coded G20 in International Classification of Diseases-10) was collected in 2010 and 2017 from a national database published in Ukraine (Appendix S1: Part A). As Ukraine is divided into 25 regions with additional data for the cities of Kyiv and Sevastopol, there were 27 data points in 2010. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea (including Sevastopol city) was temporarily occupied in 2014 so in 2017, only 25 data points were collected. National information has not been available since 2018 because of reorganization of the healthcare system. However, adult prevalence data from 2019 to 2020 was obtained from the Kyiv region (excluding Kyiv city) (personal communication Dr. Anatoly Galusha, Chief Neurologist of Kyiv region). The overall CPR of PD in Ukraine was 59.6 per 100,000 in 2010, and rose to 67.5 per 100,000 by 2017. Significant geographic differences were seen (Fig. 1, Appendix S1: Table S1). The latest CPR in Ukraine remains lower than the rate reported by other eastern European countries collected over a similar time period, which range from 93.3 to 404/100,000. We suspect that underdiagnoses and unequal access to healthcare remain determinants of the relatively low Ukrainian prevalence (Appendix S1: Part B). Recent data from the Kyiv region revealed the prevalence of PD in adults (age, 18–100 years-old) was 97/100,000 in 2019, and decreased to 77/100,000 by the end of 2020. Although the Kyiv region previously recorded a higher prevalence in 2017, rates were lower in 2019 and 2020. The reasons for this are still unclear, but deaths and lower accessibility to medical care related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic could have played a role.