Parkinson's prevalence in the UK
Our latest study on the prevalence of Parkinson's in the UK was published in Movement Disorders Clinical Practice in October 2025. This resource summarises key findings and considerations from the study for health and care professionals.
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We published a study into the prevalence of Parkinson’s and other forms of Parkinsonism in the UK, in Movement Disorders Clinical Practice, in October 2025.
It shows that there has been an unexpected drop in the prevalence rate since the pandemic, and data suggests that this is due to a lack of access to neurology services due to low numbers of specialists, long waiting lists and slow NHS service recovery.
The data also provides some figures on life expectancy compared to matched controls at the time of diagnosis.
Key findings
In the UK, the current total number of people diagnosed with Parkinson’s is around 166,000. This number is rising, due to the ageing population and the increasing life expectancy of people diagnosed with young onset Parkinson’s.
The annual number of new Parkinson’s diagnoses dropped by 26% (from 26,000 to 19,300) between 2019 and 2021, and the diagnosis rate still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Parkinson’s UK believes this is due to lack of access to neurology services due to specialist shortages, extensive waiting lists, and slow NHS recovery. This means there are over 20,000 people waiting for a Parkinson’s diagnosis.
- 59% of people living with Parkinson’s in the UK today are men.
- On average, people living with Parkinson’s were diagnosed at age 69. The average age of a person living with Parkinson’s in the UK is 77 years.
- 1 in 16 people with Parkinson’s were under 50 when they received a diagnosis. Over 1 in 3 were of working age (under 67).
- The most deprived areas had a 9% lower prevalence of Parkinson’s than the least deprived.
- People living in rural areas have a 5% lower prevalence than those in urban areas.
Explore the prevalence study
You can read the published prevalence paper in Movement Disorders Clinical Practice.
Webinar for professionals
Understanding the prevalence and incidence of Parkinson's in the UK
If you're a health or care professional, join us for one of our prevalence data webinars. Professor Donald Grosset, Consultant Neurologist at the Institute of Neurological Sciences, Glasgow, and Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow, and Lance Lee, Analytics and Insight Lead, at Parkinson's UK, will introduce and take you through the findings of the study. The presentation will be followed by a Q and A.
2 dates are available, and you'll be able to access a recording from this page after the webinars have taken place.
- Thursday 30 October 2025, 1pm to 2.15pm
- Thursday 13 November 2025, 1pm to 2.15pm
Register for a prevalence webinar
Tick this box and submit to confirm you are a health or care professional. You'll then be able to choose your webinar date and register your details on Eventbrite.
Signposting people with Parkinson's to our prevalence study information
You may find that your patients with Parkinson's and their loved ones come to you with questions about the study and its findings. We've written a blog article you can signpost your patients to and created a webpage looking at the statistics of the study. You can signpost your patients to these pages:
More information on the prevalence study
The study was written by some of our Parkinson’s UK colleagues in the Data and Insight team, in partnership with some leading neurological and epidemiological researchers. The authors are: Dr Sacha Gandhi, Dr Katherine Grosset, Professor Donald Grosset, Professor Yoav Ben-Shlomo, Prasanth Iruthayaraj, Romel Gravesande, Lance Lee and Cathal Doyle.
Parkinson’s UK invested £125,000 in this study, which took 18 months. Governments and the NHS do not regularly track Parkinson's prevalence, so we conduct these studies to understand the number of people living with the condition in the UK and their locations. This allows us to make sure that those people have the support that they need, both from the charity and the NHS.
The study is the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, and used data from a number of sources to calculate the number of people living with Parkinson’s in the UK. The study identified people with Parkinson’s in 3 ways: those with a diagnosis on their primary care GP record, hospital admission records and those currently taking anti-Parkinson medications and likely to go on to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Previous studies only used GP records to estimate prevalence. This study used 18 million GP records. Our last study was able to access just 5 million records.
The study uses 2023 data from multiple sources to understand the number of people with Parkinson’s at that time. To make it relevant to 2025, we’ve applied the Official of National Statistics’ population forecasts to estimate the latest figures. We’ll next update the figure in 2027 to reflect changes in the UK population then.