Abstract
Studies on evoked responses in Parkinson's disease (PD) may be useful for elucidating the etiology and quantitative evaluation of PD. However, in previous studies, the association between evoked responses and detailed motor symptoms or cognitive functions has not been clear. This study investigated the characteristics of the visual (VEF), auditory (AEF), and somatosensory (SEF) evoked magnetic fields in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), and the correlations between evoked fields and the patient's clinical characteristics, motor symptoms, and cognitive functions. Twenty patients with PD and 10 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited as participants. We recorded VEF, AEF, and SEF, collected clinical characteristics, performed physical examinations, and administered 10 cognitive tests. We investigated differences in the latencies of the evoked fields between patients with PD and HCs. We also evaluated the correlation of the latencies with motor symptoms and cognitive functioning. There were significant differences between the two groups in 6 of the cognitive tests, all of which suggested mild cognitive impairment in patients with PD. The latencies of the VEF N75m, P100m, N145m, AEF P50m, P100m, and SEF P60m components were greater in the patients with PD than in the HCs. The latencies mainly correlated with medication and motor symptoms, less so with cognitive tests, with some elements of the correlations remaining significant after Bonferroni correction. In conclusion, the latencies of the VEF, AEF, and SEF were greater in PD patients than in HCs and were mainly correlated with medication and motor symptoms rather than cognitive functioning. Findings from this study suggest that evoked fields may reflect basal ganglia functioning and are candidates for assessing motor symptoms or the therapeutic effects of medication in patients with PD.
Highlights
Various cognitive deficits develop during the course of Parkinson’s disease (PD)
Sustained attention deficits are likely to be present in PD since among all the cognitive tests performed in our study, VCT and ADT remained significant after Bonferroni correction
We investigated the characteristics of cognitive functioning and evoked fields in patients with PD
Summary
Many types of cognitive deficits can be indicative of neurodegeneration of the cerebral cortex [1]. Evoked responses are electrophysiological recordings that reflect the functioning of sensory pathways in the corresponding part of the cerebral cortex of the stimulated modality, and are widely used in clinical contexts. A decrease in the amplitude of the N30 component of the somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) is reported in PD [3]. This could be since he frontal P20-N30-P40 complex (responsible for SEP) is generated with a cortico-subcortico-cortical reentry loop indicating cortical dysfunction in PD. Several clinical characteristics and measures, such as disease duration [5], and scores on the Unified PD Rating Scale (UPDRS) [6,7,8,9] and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) [10,11,12,13], have been assessed as possible factors related to these electrophysiological abnormalities, but no consistent associations have been identified
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