What is the evidence to support home environmental adaptation in Parkinson's disease? A call for multidisciplinary interventions

“Home” is where one has a sense of belonging and feels secure, but it can also be a risky place for people with Parkinson's disease (PD). PD patients need assistance making adjustments to their physical environment to maintain appropriate care and provide a safe environment. This relationship is called the “person-environmental fit” (P-E fit). While most PD patients remain in their own homes, little is known about the specific challenges that PD patients and their caregivers encounter in the routine activities of daily living. The aim of our study was to identify the existing evidence on the issue of housing environmental adaptation in PD by performing a systematic review with a proposal of development strategies to integrate a multidisciplinary team into a home environmental research. MEDLINE, and life science journals were searched by querying appropriate key words, but revealed very few publications in this area. However, early evidence suggested that PD patients do not enjoy an adequate P-E fit in their own homes and face more functional limitations compared to matched controls. We concluded that we need to develop research-based evaluation strategies that can provide us with a theoretical and conceptual basis as well as tools for analysis of the P-E fit for PD patients and caregivers. We recommend that individual members of the multidisciplinary team including patients, caregivers, physicians, rehabilitation specialists, and social workers use a team approach to identify the key indicators and solutions for the development of PD-specific solutions for improving the P-E fit.