Abstract
Background
Verbal fluency impairments are among the earliest and most common cognitive deficits in Parkinson’s disease (PD), yet more than one study has shown that as a group, verbal fluency performance is not always different between patients with PD and age-matched controls. Here we examined whether PD-related deficits in speech and language capabilities are detectable in patients who exhibit poor midline motor function, such as control of gait. We postulated that if phonemic verbal fluency (PVF) performance in PD is dissociable from other factors such as age in this patient subgroup, a low PVF will likely reflect a general cognitive-motor deficit attributable to Parkinsonian pathology.
Methods
Thirty-one PD and thirteen controls were evaluated on PVF and the Metronome-Paced Square Step Test (MPSST), a complex sensorimotor task that challenges axial and midline function. The MPSST requires a patient to initiate and maintain a consecutive series of diagonal and midline cross-over steps during the test.
Results
We found that despite similar PVF performance between groups, the vast majority of controls but not patients completed the MPSST without any errors, and the odds of completing the MPSST without any errors was 15 times greater among control. More importantly, a significant amount of PVF variability was explained by MPSST performance in PD but not controls even after controlling for age and disease duration.
Conclusion
Together, these results provide evidence that PVF performance in PD likely reflects a PD-specific process and suggests that the MPSST may be a more sensitive test of PD-specific pathology than PVF.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the support from Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Alberta Innovates-Health Solutions, MITACs, Parkinson Alberta Society, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Dr. Ranjit Ranawaya from the Movement Disorders Clinic-Alberta Health Services.
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On behalf of all authors, the corresponding authors state that there is no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Ethics approval was obtained from University Ethics Board for Human Research (REB ID: REB13-0009).
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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T. Chomiak and N. Meyer are co-first authors.
J. Johnson and C. Crofts contributed equally to this work.
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Chomiak, T., Meyer, N., Cihal, A. et al. Correlation between midline gait function performance and verbal fluency in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Aging Clin Exp Res 28, 469–473 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-015-0426-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-015-0426-0