Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY
Volume 19, Issue 12, Pages 1525-1531Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-1331.2012.03759.x
Keywords
deep brain stimulation; neuropsychology; Parkinson's disease; verbal fluency
Categories
Funding
- NIH/NINDS
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Background and purpose Despite common occurrences of verbal fluency declines following bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD), alternating fluency measures using cued and uncued paradigms have not been evaluated. Methods Twenty-three STN-DBS patients were compared with 20 non-surgical PD patients on a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, including cued and uncued intradimensional (phonemic/phonemic and semantic/semantic) and extradimensional (phonemic/semantic) alternating fluency measures at baseline and 6-month follow-up. Results STN-DBS patients demonstrated a greater decline on the cued phonemic/phonemic fluency and the uncued phonemic/semantic fluency tasks compared to the PD patients. For STN-DBS patients, verbal learning and information processing speed accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in declines in alternating phonemic/phonemic and phonemic/semantic fluency scores, respectively, whilst only naming was related to uncued phonemic/semantic performance for the PD patients. Both groups were aided by cueing for the extradimensional task at baseline and follow-up, and the PD patients were also aided by cueing for the phonemic/phonemic task on follow-up. Conclusions These findings suggest that changes in alternating fluency are not related to disease progression alone as STN-DBS patients demonstrated greater declines over time than the PD patients, and this change was related to declines in information processing speed.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available