Objective: To determine cognitive fatigue in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients after attention demanding task and stress and to investigate predictors of cognitive fatigue.

Background: Fatigue is one of the most frequent non-motor complaints in Parkinson’s disease which has a great impact on patient’s cognition, performance and quality of life. Due to lack of objective measurement for cognitive fatigue, this problem is hard to solve and ignored by physicians in clinical practice.

Method: We performed a quasi-experimental study in 40 non-demented PD patients and 40 controls to determine difference in cognitive performance before and after cognitive stress. The accuracy and reaction time (answer time) used to solve stroop color test was used to measure cognitive performance and PVSAT was used for cognitive loading to create cognitive stress.

Results: The percentage change of minimum and mean answer time between pre- and post-cognitive load was significantly higher in Parkinson’s group than in control group (p = 0.047) (p = 0.008) respectively. In linear regression model, age, TMSE score and PSQI score were not factors contributed to the change of percentage. The complaining symptoms, disease duration, disease staging were not predictors of increased answer time. There was also a significant positive correlation between PSQI score and PDQ-8 score in Parkinson’s group (r = 0.66, p < 0.001).

Conclusion: Fatigue is an important non-motor symptom in Parkinson’s patients which affect cognitive performance. We demonstrated impairment of ability to maintain cognitive performance in stroop task after cognitive stress in Parkinson’s patients compared to controls. This may be an essential clue in development of tools to measure cognitive fatigue objectively.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/cognitive-fatigue-from-attention-cognitive-load-in-parkinsons-disease/