Naturalistic assessment of everyday multitasking in Parkinson’s disease with and without mild cognitive impairment

Abstract

Objective: Multitasking is an essential part of everyday functioning often not formally assessed by traditional neuropsychological tests. Although individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) experience both motor and cognitive difficulties, previous research has demonstrated more pronounced functional difficulties with the presence of mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI). The current study compared individuals with PD-MCI, PD with normal cognition (PD-NC), and healthy controls on a naturalistic task of multitasking, the Day Out Task (DOT). Method: Participants were 38 healthy older adults (HOA), 23 individuals with PD-NC, and 15 individuals with PD-MCI. Participants completed a battery of neuropsychological tasks and the DOT. Informants also completed a self-reported questionnaire of participants’ everyday executive functioning. Results: Compared to PD-NC and HOA, participants with PD-MCI were less accurate and efficient and took longer to complete the DOT. After controlling for motor performance, only DOT accuracy remained worse, with poorer accuracy resulted from more subtasks being left incomplete or being completed inaccurately by the PD-MCI group. DOT sequencing was a significant predictor of informant reported everyday dysexecutive symptoms. Conclusions: The findings highlight that individuals with PD-MCI are likely to experience difficulties completing complex everyday tasks due to both motor and cognitive impairments. Clinicians may therefore recommend strategies to support efficiency and accuracy in complex tasks of everyday functioning in treatment considerations.