Prevalence of movement disorders in an elderly nursing home population Winona Tse a, * , Leslie S. Libow b,c , Richard Neufeld b,c , Gerson Lesser b,c , Judith Frank b,c , Susan Dolan b , Chaim Tarshish b , Jean-Michel Gracies a , C. Warren Olanow a , William C. Koller a , Thomas D. Ha ¨lbig a a Department of Neurology, Mount Sinai Medical Center, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1052, New York, NY 10029, USA b Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development, Mount Sinai Medical Center, 1470 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10029, USA c Jewish Home and Hospital, 120 West 106 Street, New York, NY 10025, USA Received 25 January 2007; received in revised form 7 May 2007; accepted 8 May 2007 Available online 26 June 2007 Abstract We studied the prevalence of movement disorders in a large nursing home population (397 patients, mean age 86 years) in New York City. Patients were first evaluated by specially trained research coordinators and final clinical diagnoses were confirmed by a movement disorder specialist. A movement disorder was identified in 21% of patients (83/397). The most frequent movement disorders were essential tremor (ET) (8.8%) and parkinsonism (7.1%). Only half of those admitted with a diagnosis of parkinsonism were confirmed in their diagnosis by the movement disorder specialists. Three percent of patients exhibited drug-induced tremor, 1.3% had dystonia, 0.5% had myoclonus and 0.3% had generalized dyskinesias. Overall, our findings underline the high frequency of movement disorders in a nursing home population. The discrepancy between our findings and the prevalence rates for parkinsonism reported on the initial transfer diagnosis emphasizes the difficulty of accurate diagnosis of movement disorders and in particular parkinsonism. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. Keywords: Movement disorders; Parkinsonism; Geriatric population; Tremor; Long-term care population; Frail elderly www.elsevier.com/locate/archger Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 46 (2008) 359–366 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 212 241 6960; fax: +1 212 987 7363. E-mail address: winona.tse@mssm.edu (W. Tse). 0167-4943/$ – see front matter. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.archger.2007.05.008