Open Collections

Kuzmuk, Leah Elsie

University of British Columbia

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor impairments including bradykinesia, rest tremor, and postural instability. In addition, motor dysfunction appears in oculomotor abnormalities, specifically saccadic eye movement deficits. It is now recognized that PD extends beyond motor impairments and affects sensory and cognitive domains. PD alters a range of cognitive functions, but particularly affects response inhibition, even early in the disease course. The antisaccade task is an oculomotor paradigm used to evaluate response inhibition and is a sensitive indicator of PD. Antisaccade task performance has been well characterized in PD patients, but it is unclear what factors contribute to these deficits. Here we investigated whether antisaccade performance in mild to moderate PD is related to motor function, executive function, and or general cognitive ability. We evaluated pro- and antisaccade performance in 17 patients and 20 matched controls. Saccade latencies, amplitudes, and error rates were compared between groups, and were correlated to performance on a series of motor (Timed up and Go test) and cognitive tasks (Trail Making Task, Stroop Task, and matrices sub-test of the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Index). Relative to controls, patients showed smaller amplitude prosaccades, and more than double the frequency of errors when executing antisaccades (patients M=21.7% SD= 18.6%; controls M=10.5%, SD=11.43%; p=0.013; d= 0.72). However, patients performed equal to, or better than controls on the battery of motor and cognitive assessments. Our results cautiously suggest that PD patients show deficits in response inhibition despite an absence of cognitive dysfunction on standard neuropsychological tools. With additional investigation, antisaccade task performance has the potential to be a sensitive indicator of early changes in response inhibition in PD, to be used as a tool in compliment with clinical evaluation.

Text

2023-08-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85585

Neuroscience

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/