Cortical dynamics and subcortical signatures of motor-language coupling in Parkinson?s disease

MELLONI MARGHERITA; SEDEÑO LUCAS; HESSE EUGENIA; GARCÍA CORDERO INDIRA; MIKULAN EZEQUIEL; PLASTINO ANGELO; MARCOTTI AIDA; LOPEZ JOSE; BUSTAMANTE CATALINA; LOPERA FRANCISCO; PINEDA DAVID; GARCIA ADOLFO; MANES FACUNDO; IBAÑEZ AGUSTIN

Congreso; Neurocog, Primer Encuentro de Neurociencia Cognitiva; 2015

Impairments of action language have been documented in early stage Parkinson?s disease (EPD) [1]. Recent neurocognitive models suggested that motor-language coupling depends on a distributed network involving basal ganglia (BG) structures [2]. According to this model, BG impairment would disturb processing in this cortico-subcortical motor network, leading to action-verb deficits in EPD patients. Thus, this population may offer crucial information on the role of BG-cortical circuits in language processing. To explore this possibility, we administered the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) paradigm [3] to a group of EPD patients and examined : cortical recordings of the motor potential (MP) and re-afferent potential (RAP) structural analysis of the BG through voxel-based morphometry (VBM) oscillatory connectivity patternsby MRI and ERPs analysis. Our results support a model of motor cognition which highlights the contributions of complex BG circuitry to action-verb processing. Our results showed that:ACE is impaired in EPD In controls, the MP and the RAP presented larger amplitudes in the compatible than in the incompatible condition, whereas EPD patients exhibited no such cortical modulations during the task EPD patients exibited aberrant frontotemporal connectivityIn EPD, overall BG volume as well as specific BG atrophy regions predicted MP abnormalities during performance of the ACE task