Pilot Survey of the Prevalence of Neurologic Disorders in the Parsi Community of Bombay

Abstract

There is a paucity of trained neurologists in developing countries. We designed a questionnaire to rapidly screen a community of 851 people (Parsis living in a colony in Bombay, India) for possible neurologic diseases. This questionnaire was pretested and found to have a sensitivity of 100 percent for detecting epilepsy, febrile seizures (only in children), completed stroke, peripheral neuropathy, movement disorders, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, and severe dementia. The screening questionnaire was administered by trained lay health workers. One hundred and sixty-three people were identified by this questionnaire as possibly having neurologic disease. Neurologists later examined these 163 people and found that 80 of them actually suffered from at least one of the neurologic diseases of interest (positive predictive value = 48 percent). The most common neurologic disorders were peripheral neuropathy (32 cases), essential tremor (13 cases), stroke (12 cases), Parkinson's disease (six cases), and epilepsy (four cases).