Objective: We assessed the performance of patients with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) in a series of semantic memory (SM) tasks including both living and nonliving semantic domains

Background: Recent studies suggest that the basal ganglia have a principal role in functions other than motor performance. In PD patients, deficits in action-verb processing have been described, however, a topic that remains under-investigated is the difference between living and non-living entities within the concrete domain.

Method: We compared the performance of 30 PD patients vs. 30 thirty neurologically healthy participants using neuropsychological and experimental tests.PD participants who met UK Parkinson Disease Society Brain Bank criteria (1) were evaluated using part III of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) and Hoehn and Yahr’s (2) stages I or II. All the patients were undergoing antiparkinsonian therapy and were evaluated during the “on” phase of their medication.  All patients and controls were evaluated with: (3) the Addenbrooke Cognitive Examination- revised; (4) the INECO Frontal Screening; and SM tasks: picture naming [PN], naming on oral description [OD], word-picture matching [WP].

Results: No differences were found between PD patients and healthy controls in the ACE-R total score (p = 0.83). However, their total IFS score was significantly lower than that of controls (p = 0.003). Regarding SM, PD patients reported lower scores on the three tasks (manipulable objects): PN (p<0.001), OD (p =0.02); and WP (p = 0.03).

Conclusion: In the present study, PD patients exhibited impaired SM as compared with healthy participants. More importantly, we found category-specific deficits between living things vs non-living things, with a poor performance for non-living entities in PD, systematically in the different tasks. These results open new pathways in the fields of theoretical approaches to language understanding, and models of motor-language coupling.

References: (1) Hughes AJ, Daniel SE, Kilford L, and Lees AJ. Accuracy of clinical diagnosis of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease: A clinico- pathological study of 100 cases. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 55(3): 181e184, 1992. (2) Hoehn MM and Yahr MD. Parkinsonism: Onset, progression and mortality. Neurology, 17(5): 427e442, 1967. (3) Torralva, T., Roca, M., Gleichgerrcht, E., Bonifacio, A., Raimondi, C., & Manes, F. (2011). Validación de la versión en español del Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-Revisado (ACE-R). Neurologia, 26(6), 351-356. (4) Torralva, T., Roca, M., Gleichgerrcht, E., Lopez, P., & Manes, F. (2009b). INECO Frontal Screening (IFS): a brief, sensitive, and specific tool to assess executive functions in dementia. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 15(5), 777e786.

« Back to 2019 International Congress

MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/semantic-memory-assessment-in-parkinsons-disease/