ABSTRACT
Parkinson's disease [PD] is one of the commonest neurodegenerative disorders. Its frequency increases with increasing age. The Parkinsonian syndrome is the core clinical aspect common to PD and other parkinsonian syndromes either secondary to known aetiologies or degenerative. Differential diagnosis between PD and other parkinsonian syndromes is often difficult, especially at the beginning of the disease. Recent progress in diagnosis tools [radiological, biochemical, molecular genetics] and availability of new medications make this distinction essential and often easier because of the difference of prognosis and treatment. This review is directed to summarize recent progress in diagnosis criteria of PD and parkinsonian syndromes. we performed a Medline search using the following key-words. Parkinson's disease-parkinsonian syndromes. Due to abundance of the literature on these topics we refined our research limiting to publications dedicated to diagnosis criteria and core publications on clinical picture, neuropathological aspects and rating scales. Among more than 100 publications we studied those published between 1990 and 2006, then we analyzed and compared the published diagnosis criteria, this study allowed to summarize the different diagnosis criteria of Parkinson's disease and parkinsonian syndromes and to draw a decisional algorithm for these disorders