Acta Colombiana de Psicología (Dec 2011)
ESCRITURA EN ENFERMEDAD DE PARKINSON (EP): REVISIÓN SISTEMÁTICA DE LITERATURA
Abstract
This systematic review of the literature on the study of writing disorders in Parkinson disease (PD) evaluated the available evidence with respect to research about writing and related cognitive processes in this population. A critical analysis of the literature was carried out, where the databases from Pubmed, Medline, Hinari, PsycArticles, E Journals and Science Direct, were accessed using as search criteria the publication date range between January 1, 1999 until October 1, 2009, with the exception of an article of 1997 which was included because of the contribution it provides on linguistic analysis. Search indicators were: clinical trials, reviews, meta-analysis, controlled clinical trials and discussions. A total of 39 articles were recorded, among which 15 were chosen based on their relevance and relationship with the topic of writing in PD. Six of these had taken into account linguistic variables in exclusively oral tasks; only one of them clearly describes the correlation of the grammatical structure of sentences within the writing linguistic tasks. Findings show that within the oral/linguistic studies of subjects with PD there is a predominance of correlations between neurobiological factors and alterations of oral language in comprehension tasks of semantics, syntax, grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, use of words in discourse and interaction in context. Studies of writing focus on mechanical aspects, including changes in size and modification of strokes in the handwriting of PD patients. Only one study is directly related to a linguistic analysis of writing, where parameters such as sentence length, syntactic complexity and lexical-semantic content were considered. The writing process in PD patients has been analyzed from the mechanical disturbance, that is, from the physical form of strokes and has been correlated with impaired motor functions underlying the main motor dysfunction in PD, and although an associated cognitive impairment has been acknowledged, this correlation has not extended to the writing process.
