A Study Of Cognition Function In Patients With Parkinson Disease

Background Parkinson disease(PD) is a common degenerative disease of the central nervous system, the clinical symptoms are often not only exhibited with dyskinesis but also associated with cognitive impairment. Executive function and social function as the essential psychological attributes of all the cognitive processes, have received widespread concern from many scholars. Stroop color-word test(WST) used in patients with frontal lobe injury or schizophrenia is one of the classic methods in executive function study, however, it is rarely reported using in non-dementia PD patients. Generally speaking, social cognition study involve social information perception and social problem-solving ability. Studies have found PD patient's impaired social problem-solving ability, but it isn't clear whether perception of social information were impaired.Objective 1, To explore SWT's role in evaluation of executive function among non-dementia PD patients throughing Stroop color word test in non-dementia PD patients. 2, To investigate whether the ability of social cognition were declined in Parkinson's disease, trying to further support the hypothesis that the basal ganglia participate in social cognitive processing.Methods Study 1: 30 PD patients and 36 age- and education-matched healthy controls were enrolled in the executive function tests. Executive abilities were measured with Stroop word-color test. Study 2: 30 PD patients and 36 age and education-matched healthy controls were enrolled in the social cognition tests. Social cognition abilities were measured with two neuropsychological tasks: eye emotion recognition(happy, surprise, fear, sad, disgust, anger) and faux pas recognition task.Results Study 1: There were no significant differences between Parkinson diseases group and control group in reaction time of completing cards A and B(PD, Controls: 17.91±3.82 21.86±3.62,20.11±6.70 24.28±9.17, P> 0.05). Patients with Parkinson diseases showed a longer reaction time in completing cards C(PD, Controls: 39.34±12.95 33.77±8.89, P<0.05). There were significant Stroop interfere effects in patients with Parkinson disease group (PD, Controls: 17.48±12.2 9.5±7.06, P<0.05). Study 2: Patients with Parkinson diseases showed a large and highly significant deficit in the faux pas task(PD, Controls: 27.03±6.11, 36.89±3.81, Z =?5.793, P=0.000). There was no significant difference between Parkinson diseases group and control group in eye emotion recognition(happy, surprise, fear, sad, disgust, anger: Zs =?0.850, ?0.674, ?0.418,?0.189,?0.394,?0.228,Ps=0.395,0.5,0.676,0.85,0.694,0.82). Correlation analysis revealed no relation among Hoehn-Yahr stage, eye emotions and faux pas.Conclusion The results confirm that there were deficits of cognition function and executive function in Parkinson diseases, the stroop color-word test may play an important role in evaluating the executive function of Parkinson diseases. The basal ganglia may play an important role in cognition function.