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Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study

BACKGROUND: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common symptom in the patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The characteristics of cognitive impairment in PD are executive function (including working memory) and visuo-perceptual processing. The visuospatial n-back test has the merit of minimizing...

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Autores principales: Kawashima, Shoji, Shimizu, Yoko, Ueki, Yoshino, Matsukawa, Noriyuki
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414685/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34479502
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12883-021-02366-7
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author Kawashima, Shoji
Shimizu, Yoko
Ueki, Yoshino
Matsukawa, Noriyuki
author_facet Kawashima, Shoji
Shimizu, Yoko
Ueki, Yoshino
Matsukawa, Noriyuki
author_sort Kawashima, Shoji
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common symptom in the patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The characteristics of cognitive impairment in PD are executive function (including working memory) and visuo-perceptual processing. The visuospatial n-back test has the merit of minimizing the influence of educational biases involved in the verbal n-back test. Furthermore, it can assess both visuospatial recognition and working memory in a single test. METHODS: We aimed to clarify the advantage of the visuospatial n-back test as a tool for detecting impairments of working memory in PD. We enrolled 28 right-handed patients with PD (18 males, 10 females) and 12 age-matched healthy controls (HC; 7 males, 5 females). Thirteen patients were classified as MCI (PD-MCI), and 15 as cognitively normal PD (PD-CN). Using functional MRI (fMRI), we explored the specific brain regions associated with the performance of the n-back test in the PD-MCI, PD-CN, and HC groups. The 0-back test assesses visuospatial recognition, while the 1-back and 2-back tests assess visuospatial working memory. Group comparisons were performed for three loads of this test. RESULTS: Patients with PD performed significantly worse in terms of the correct answer rates of all n-back tests compared with HC. fMRI analyses performed during the 2-back test revealed reduced activation in the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and parietal lobule in the PD group compared with the HC group. In contrast, the fMRI result during the 0-back test showed only a marginal difference in the frontal lobe. On comparisons of task performance between the PD-MCI and PD-CN groups, we found that the correct answer rate in the 2-back test was lower in the PD-MCI group than in the PD-CN group. However, scores of the 0-back and 1-back tests were not significantly different between the two groups. The fMRI findings revealed that activations within the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL) during the 2-back test were reduced in the patients with PD-MCI when compared to those with PD-CN. CONCLUSIONS: This study reports reduced activation of the MFG and IPL in patients with PD-MCI. These regions may be associated with the pathophysiology of working memory impairment in patients with PD, which involves fronto-striatal network dysfunction.
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spelling pubmed-84146852021-09-09 Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study Kawashima, Shoji Shimizu, Yoko Ueki, Yoshino Matsukawa, Noriyuki BMC Neurol Research BACKGROUND: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common symptom in the patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The characteristics of cognitive impairment in PD are executive function (including working memory) and visuo-perceptual processing. The visuospatial n-back test has the merit of minimizing the influence of educational biases involved in the verbal n-back test. Furthermore, it can assess both visuospatial recognition and working memory in a single test. METHODS: We aimed to clarify the advantage of the visuospatial n-back test as a tool for detecting impairments of working memory in PD. We enrolled 28 right-handed patients with PD (18 males, 10 females) and 12 age-matched healthy controls (HC; 7 males, 5 females). Thirteen patients were classified as MCI (PD-MCI), and 15 as cognitively normal PD (PD-CN). Using functional MRI (fMRI), we explored the specific brain regions associated with the performance of the n-back test in the PD-MCI, PD-CN, and HC groups. The 0-back test assesses visuospatial recognition, while the 1-back and 2-back tests assess visuospatial working memory. Group comparisons were performed for three loads of this test. RESULTS: Patients with PD performed significantly worse in terms of the correct answer rates of all n-back tests compared with HC. fMRI analyses performed during the 2-back test revealed reduced activation in the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and parietal lobule in the PD group compared with the HC group. In contrast, the fMRI result during the 0-back test showed only a marginal difference in the frontal lobe. On comparisons of task performance between the PD-MCI and PD-CN groups, we found that the correct answer rate in the 2-back test was lower in the PD-MCI group than in the PD-CN group. However, scores of the 0-back and 1-back tests were not significantly different between the two groups. The fMRI findings revealed that activations within the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL) during the 2-back test were reduced in the patients with PD-MCI when compared to those with PD-CN. CONCLUSIONS: This study reports reduced activation of the MFG and IPL in patients with PD-MCI. These regions may be associated with the pathophysiology of working memory impairment in patients with PD, which involves fronto-striatal network dysfunction. BioMed Central 2021-09-03 /pmc/articles/PMC8414685/ /pubmed/34479502 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12883-021-02366-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Kawashima, Shoji
Shimizu, Yoko
Ueki, Yoshino
Matsukawa, Noriyuki
Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study
title Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study
title_full Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study
title_fullStr Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study
title_full_unstemmed Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study
title_short Impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with Parkinson’s Disease: an fMRI study
title_sort impairment of the visuospatial working memory in the patients with parkinson’s disease: an fmri study
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414685/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34479502
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12883-021-02366-7
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