Verbal Reasoning Impairment in Parkinson's Disease

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to assess verbal reasoning (VR) functioning in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and healthy controls (HCs). METHODS: The non-demented PD patients and HCs matched by age and global cognition were enrolled in this study. VR was assessed with the verbal reasoning test (VRT), total score, and subsets. RESULTS: Eighty-seven PD patients (51 men; mean age 63.8 ± 7.9 years) and 87 HCs (46 men; mean age 63.7 ± 8.0 years) were enrolled. At univariate analysis, PD patients presented a significantly lower score in the VRT subset classification (12.3 ± 2.1) than HCs (12.9 ± 1.7) with an odds ratio (OR) of 0.8 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.70–0.98; p = 0.003). The strength of association was also confirmed at multivariate analysis (OR = 0.8, 95% CI 0.70–0.98; p = 0.003). Moreover, in PD patients, a statistically significant positive correlation was found between VRT-classification and MoCA scores (r = 0.330; p = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS: PD patients presented lower VR performance than HCs.