CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Early detection and effective management of the nonmotor symptoms of Parkinson?s disease (PD) is integral to the quality of life of both patients and caregivers. Even though cognitive impairment in the early stages of the disease may be subtle, the presence of early cognitive deficits is now well established, with executive function deficits being the most frequently reported.1?7Even if an extensive evaluation of executive functions is critical to obtain an accurate description of a patient?s neuropsychological profile, such evaluations are not always available to clinicians working with patients with PD. Thus, the existence of a brief screening tool, which is easy to administer and yet shows high sensitivity and specificity in the detection of executive deficits in patients with early PD would be of great value for clinicians working with patients with PD.Faced with a verbal fluency test, subjects are asked to enumerate either words beginning with a given letter within a limited amount of time (phonological fluency) or words within a given category, such as animals (semantic fluency). These tasks are easy to administer, take no longer than 2 minutes and require no specific materials. The phonological version is thought to reflect more strongly on executive functioning, as it demands that participants list words using a rule that is not natural to the way words are organized in our brain.8 The phonological fluency test has been shown useful in the detection of cognitive deficits in pathologies with frontal involvement.9 Even if verbal fluency represents a well-known test of executive function with established age-based norms, its properties as screening tool in the detection of broader executive dysfunction in PD has not yet been established.The objective of the present study was, therefore, to investigate the utility of the phonological verbal fluency test in the detection of executive deficits in patients with early PD.

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