Objective: To evaluate the impulsivity in patients with Parkinson’s Disease.

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic, neurodegenerative, progressive disease characterized with cardinal motor symptoms and non-motor symptoms including neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, psychosis and impulse control disorders (ICDs). In addition to ICDs such as hypersexuality, excessive shopping,pathological gambling, over eating, and punding which are more common in PD patients after commencing dopaminergic therapy that encounters approximately 15% of the patients. However many more are thought to suffer from subclinical symptoms of impulsivity which are underestimated in clinical studies.

Methods: Forty-seven adults diagnosed as idiopathic Parkinson’s disease due to the Queen Square Brain Bank criteria and 30 age-matched healthy controls that provided written informed consent were enrolled the study. Socio-demographic data of all participants, and disease characteristics such as the duration of disease, initial symptoms, treatments, and modified Hoehn and Yahr scores in the patient group were recorded via face-to- face interviews. All participants completed the Barratt impulsiveness scale(BIS). Data were organized in SPSS Version 23 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences for Windows) database. Statistical analyses were performed with descriptive statistics, χ2 test, Student-t test, Man-Whitney U test, correlation, regression analysis. P values<0.05 were considered to indicate statistical significance.

Results: There was no difference between patients and controls in terms of age (p>0.05) and gender (p>0.05). Total BIS total scores were higher in PD group than heathy controls (p=0.038, t:2.1). When we evaluated the items of BIS, attentional impulsivity scores were also higher in PD patients than controls (p=0.005, t=2.8), while there was no statistically significant difference between groups in terms of motor and non-planning impulsivity ((p=0.07,z=1.8 and p=0.31, t:1.1, respectively).

Conclusions: Our findings indicate that attentional impulsivity is important in patients with PD, which has a crucial role in quality of life of patients. However, there were no differences between patients and controls in terms of motor and non-planning impulsivity, which could be attributed to relatively small sample size and cross-sectional design of our study which are the main limitations. Further studies including cognitive assessments should be done to make comments on the attentional impulsivity in PD patients.

References: 1. Weintraub D, Claassen DO. Impulse Control and Related Disorders in Parkinson’s Disease. Int Rev Neurobiol. 2017;133:679-717. doi: 10.1016/bs.irn.2017.04.006. 2. Vriend C. The neurobiology of impulse control disorders in Parkinson’s disease: from neurotransmitters to neural networks. Cell and Tissue Research 2018 Jan 30. doi: 10.1007/s00441-017-2771-0. [Epub ahead of print].

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/evaluation-of-impulsivity-in-parkinson-s-disease/