BACKGROUND Good self-care and medication adherence are very important elements for PD holistic care. In order to have these elements, people with Parkinson’s (PwP) must have good Parkinson’s disease-related knowledge. To effectively assist patient’s PD education improvement, healthcare professionals must know patients’ misunderstanding and misconceptions about PD knowledge.

OBJECTIVES : To explore patient’s PD knowledge gaps and compare PD knowledge between people with Parkinson’s (PwP) with two different educational levels for guiding optimal PD education interventions.

METHODS : The cross-sectional survey study included 128 PwP at King Chulalongkorn Memorial hospital. The Parkinson’s disease-related knowledge questionnaire consisted of three parts 1) Disease 2) treatment and 3) Self-care knowledge which were tested for content validity by PD specialists and reliability before conducting the interview.

RESULTS : Top three most wrong answers of Parkinson’s disease-related knowledge were about non-motor symptoms, levodopa and stem cell transplantation. PwP with Bachelor’s degree or above gained significantly higher scores of total PD knowledge (p =0.001) in all aspects of disease (p = 0.037), treatment (p =0.019) and self-care (p=0.022) than PwP with below Bachelor’s degree.

CONCLUSIONS : Proper use of levodopa is critical knowledge that must be provided to all PwP. Knowledge of non-motor symptoms and stem cell transplantation are required to correct the misunderstanding and misconceptions about PD. PwP with low education required an intensive PD education about the nature of disease, levodopa, PD medication adherence, alternative medicines and movement management in order to gain good self-care and medication adherence.