Altered Emotional Cognitive Ability And Dual-task Performance In Patients With Parkinson's Disease After Subthalamic Nucleus Stimulation

Background:Parkinson's disease(PD)patients exhibit deficits in emotional recognition and expression abilities,including emotional faces and voices.Objective:1.To explore emotional processing in pre-deep brain stimulation(DBS)PD patients using two sensory modalities(visual and auditory).2.To explore emotional prosody processing in patients with PD shortly after subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation(STN DBS).3.To explore dual-task performance in patients with PD shortly after STN DBS.Methods:1.Fifteen PD patients and fifteen healthy controls were recruited.All participants were assessed by the KDEF 50 test.Vocal recognition was evaluated by the MAV 50 test.For emotional facial expression,the participants were asked to imitate five basic emotions(neutral,happiness,anger,fear,and sadness).The subjects were required to express nonverbal vocalizations of the five basic emotions.Fifteen Chinese native speakers were recruited as decoders.We recorded the accuracy of the responses,RT and CL.2.Two groups of patients with PD(pre-DBS and post-DBS)and one healthy control(HC)group were recruited.All participants(PD and HC)were assessed using the MAV 50 test.All participants were asked to nonverbally express five basic emotions to test emotional prosody expression.Fifteen native Chinese speakers were recruited as raters.We recorded the accuracy rate,RT,CL,and two acoustic parameters(mean pitch and mean intensity).3.Tweenty-one PD patients were recruited.All participants were asked to perform the Dual-task test.We recorded the average step walking speed,average step cadence,average step size,average step time,cadence speed ratio.Results:1.For emotional recognition and expression,the PD group scored lower on both facial and vocal emotional processing than did the healthy control(HC)group.There were significant differences between the two groups in both RT and CL.A significant relationship was also found between emotional recognition and emotional expression.2.The PD groups scored lower than the HC group in recognizing and expressing emotional prosody.STN DBS had no significant effect on the recognition of emotional prosody but had a significant effect on fear prosody expression.Pearson's correlation analysis revealed significant correlations between performance on emotional prosody recognition tests and on emotional prosody expression tests in both the pre-DBS PD and post-DBS PD groups.3.STN DBS had significant effect on the Dual-task performance.Conclusion:1.The PD group exhibited poorer performance on both the recognition and expression tasks.Facial emotion deficits and vocal emotion abnormalities were associated.In addition,our data allow us to speculate that emotional recognition and expression may share a common system.2.Shortly after STN DBS,the ability to recognize emotional prosody was not altered,but fear expression was impaired.We identified associations between abnormalities in emotional prosody recognition and expression deficits both before and after STN DBS,indicating that the processes involved in recognizing and expressing emotional prosody may share a common system.3.STN DBS had significant effect on the Dual-task performance.