Objective: Use a news automated, motor-controlled cognitive battery, the SelfCog®, to compare cognitive deficits in PD patients.

Background: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a major risk factor of dementia in PD. Differentiating MCI patients from cognitively normal subjects entails an extensive evaluation lasting more than one hour with an experienced neuropsychologist. It could be favourably replaced by a brief (15 min) automated assessment, for which reaction times are corrected for the motor status of the patient.

Method: PD consecutive patients (n=80) fulfilling UK PDS Brain Bank criteria were selected based on disease duration ≥5 y., age <78 y. and French as native language. Patients were classified in PD-nonMCI (n=51, 65.47 ± 6.88 yo) or PD-MCI (n=29, 65.79 ± 6.62 yo) using a comprehensive cognitive assessment (Level II from the MDS Task Force). All patients and 53 healthy controls (HC) were tested with the SelfCog®, which assesses motor, language, memory, attention, visuospatial and executive functions in 15 min. During the test, participants must press a button in response to visual cues. Inverse efficiency scores (IES) were calculated by dividing response time by accuracy for each function and averaged over all the cognitive parts (global IES). A mixed linear regression model adjusted for age and education was calibrated to evaluate differences in IES scores between PD patients and HC and another to analyze evolution over 2 years for 28 PD patients. Comparison of SelfCog® performance as an assessment tool was conducted by comparing the Cohen’s d of each IES score with classical cognitive tests designed to assess similar domains.

Results: IES were higher (worse) in PD-MCI than in HC for the global, language (both p<0.001), executive and long-term memory (both p<0.01) scores; with the same significant differences between PD-MCI and PD-nonMCI (all p<0.05). Global IES evaluated global cognitive efficiency of PD patients, with a large effect size (Cohen’s d=-0.98, p<0.001), as does the MoCA (Cohen’s d=1.07, p<0.001). Over 2 years, global (p<0.001), motor, visual, executive (all p values <0.05) and long-term memory (p<0.01) IES of PD patients increased significantly, with no group effect.

Conclusion: In this cohort, the SelfCog® could differentiate PD-MCI from HC and PD-nonMCI in only 15 minutes. It properly assesses the overall cognitive efficiency of PD patients, with a large effect size.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/selfcog-a-15-min-digitized-cognitive-battery-to-measure-cognitive-deficit-in-parkinson-disease-pd-patients/