Objective: A disturbance of verbal fluency (VBF) in essential tremor patients compared to healthy controls is well described. The underlying structural alterations that a causative for this impairment are, however, obscure. In this study we therefore focussed on gray and white matter alterations in essential tremor patients, who showed a deficiency in VBF.

Background: Essential tremor has been primarily characterized by its motor symptoms which might express with heterogeneous severity with at times devastating implications in terms of patients quality of life. Recently, however, an increasing body of evidence indicates additional non-motor features in ET-patients, which have even higher impact on the individual life of each patient. Thereby, several studies highlight executive functions being adversely affected in general and verbal fluency, in particular (1). The underlying structural alterations resulting in these VBF deficits remain elusive.

Methods: In this study we performed structural analyses, where we studied (a) changes of 20 ET patients (10 women and 10 men) compared to 23 age- and gender-matched controls and performed (b) a correlation analysis to the decreasing VBF results of the ET patients compared to the controls by a voxel based morphometry analysis and tract based-spatial statistics.

Results: We found (I) in the group comparison a specific decrease of gray matter in the right precuneus [p < 0.001; ], (II) large white matter alterations correlating with the increasing tremor rating scale [p < 0.05; in accordance to previous studies], (III) a significant correlation with VBF in the right putamen with a decrease in gray matter values [p < 0.01; ] and (IV) significant alterations in the corpus callosum in the FA map [p < 0.01].

Conclusions: These findings support a structural correlate of the often-described non-motor features in ET at the example of disturbed VBF. In future, a combination with functional studies in ET are necessary, to reveal the exact role of the affected regions in executive tasks (like VBF). 1. Tröster, A. I. et al. Neuropsychological deficits in essential tremor: an expression of cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathophysiology? European Journal of Neurology 9, 143–151 (2002).

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/verbal-fluency-deficits-in-essential-tremor-patients-underlying-structural-changes/