Most Movement Disorders demand assessment and management of the psychiatric symptoms, representing an extremely important interface between Psychiatry and Neurology.
In São João's Hospital, the patients followed in the Neurology Department's Movement Disorders ambulatory clinic are referred to the Psychiatry Department's outpatient clinic.
The aim of this study is to characterize the patients followed in our clinic between the years 2005 and 2007 using information collected from clinical files and an investigation protocol especially developed for this purpose. This protocol includes sociodemographic data, neurological diagnoses, psychiatric symptoms and current treatment. Once Parkinson's disease was the most representative diagnosis, the authors explored more detailed features, such as onset type, disease duration and severity, and associated these to the psychiatric clinical picture.