Abstract
Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) often underestimate time intervals, however it remains unclear why they underestimate rather than overestimate them. The current study examined time underestimation and counting in patients with PD, in relation to dopamine transporter (DaT) located on presynaptic nerve endings in the striatum. Nineteen non-dementia patients with PD and 20 age- and sex-matched healthy controls performed two time estimation tasks to produce or reproduce time intervals with counting in the head, to examine dysfunctional time counting processing. They also performed tapping tasks to measure cycles of counting with 1 s interval with time estimation. Compared to controls, patients underestimated time intervals above 10 s on time production not reproduction tasks, and the underestimation correlated with fast counting on the tapping task. Furthermore, striatal DaT protein levels strongly correlated with underestimation of time intervals. These findings suggest that distortion of time intervals is guided by cumulative output of fast cycle counting and that this is linked with striatal DaT protein deficit.
Highlights
Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) often underestimate time intervals, it remains unclear why they underestimate rather than overestimate them
Previous research has found that the dorsal striatum, which consists of the putamen and caudate nucleus, plays a central role in time and rhythm perception[1,2]
In a patient without PD, dopamine transporter (DaT) imaging indicated that binding radiations to DaT accumulated in the striatum in the shape of twin commas (Fig. 2a)
Summary
Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) often underestimate time intervals, it remains unclear why they underestimate rather than overestimate them. To better understand whether time underestimation of interval in patients with PD is based on fast time counting or not, we examined tapping speed during time estimation using a novel tapping task to measure cycles of 1 s counting (Fig. 1c,d). A post-hoc test revealed that the estimated error rates in 10 s, 20 s, 30 s, 60 s, 120 s, and 300 s trials were lower in patients with PD compared to normal controls (all p < 0.05).
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