Objective: To verify the performance and pattern of prioritization of patients with Parkinson’s disease in motor and cognitive dual tasks with different demands.

Background: Patients with Parkinson’s disease loss the automatic control of posture, gait and manual tasks. In order to compensate it, patients need more attention to perform these tasks. Normally, postural control is performed by subcortical circuits with few need of attention, while in the most case, manual function require more attention due the need of voluntary control of movements.

Methods: An observational, transversal, comparative study assessed 20 patients with Parkinson’s disease on stages 1.5 to 3 (Hoehn and Yahr scale). Performance of patients on primary task (postural control and manual task) and secondary task (cognitive task) were assessed in single and dual task condition. It were registered the number of blocks transferred of one to the other side, the number of times that the patients stand up of the chair and the number of weekdays recited correctly. In order to compare the performance in single and dual task condition it was applied the student t test. The performance of the secondary task in the three conditions and their costs were assessed with ANOVA one way and post hoc test of Tukey. It was adopted the alfa of 0.05 as statistical significance.

Results: Performance of postural control and upper extremity function on single task was higher than in dual task (p=0.002 and p=0.0001, respectively). There was no difference between the upper extremity function on single and dual task condition (p=0.063). Performance of verbal fluency in single task was higher than in dual task conditions (ANOVA, post hoc test of Tukey, p<0.001). The cost of verbal fluency was higher than the cost of upper extremity function (ANOVA, post hoc test of Tukey: * p=0.01935). There was no difference between the costs of upper extremity and postural control.

Conclusions: Postural control, upper extremity and verbal fluency showed worse performance in dual task condition, but the cost of the verbal fluency was higher than the other costs in the condition that associated verbal fluency with upper extremity function. Combination of two tasks that requires cortical resources appears to affect more the cognitive task than the motor task. Dual task that combined postural control and verbal fluency showed loss of performance of both tasks without prioritization.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/effects-of-dual-task-on-upper-extremity-function-and-postural-control-in-patients-with-parkinsons-disease/