Emotion recognition in Early Parkinson Disease

MARÍA ROCA; TERESA TORRALVA; ANABEL CHADE; OSCAR GERSHANIK; ARÉVALO GONZALO; FACUNDO MANES

Washington

Encuentro; 61st AAN 2009 Annual Meeting; 2009

American Academy of Neurology

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this investigation was to study emotion recognition in a cohort of early diagnosed Parkinson disease. BACKGROUND: Due to the fact that the neural basis of emotion recognition are implied in Parkinson Disease (PD) pathology, emotion recognition in this disease is now becoming an important subject of study. DESIGN/METHODS: We compared the performance of patients with early PD receiving medication (n = 10), patients with early PD receiving no medication (n = 10), and matched healthy controls (n =10) with an emotion recognition test and a complete neuropsychological battery. The experimental task used in this study was the Emotion Hexagon Task. Patients were also assessed with a test of recognition of famous faces and with a complete cognitive battery. RESULTS: Significant differences between PD patients (both medicated and unmedicated) and normal controls were found on the recognition of most emotions assessed, with happiness, surprise, anger, fear and sadness faces presenting more difficulties in the recognition of more ambiguous pictures. When performance was compared between PD patients with and without dopaminergic medication, no significant differences were found. Only the RAVLT recognition score (p = .036), the Token test (p < .01), the TMT-A and TMT-B (both p < .01) differed between medicated and unmedicated PD patients. Of these, only the recognition score (r = .64, p < .001) and latency to complete TMT-A (r = -.47, p = .024) significantly correlated with the total Emotion score of the Hexagon test. CONCLUSIONS/RELEVANCE: Significant differences were found on the capacity to recognize facial emotions in patients with early Parkinson disease. The failure in the emotion recognition may be related to performance in other cognitive tasks.