Cognitive decline in patients with Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

The goal of our study was to assess the cognitive state in patients with Parkinson′s disease (PD). We studied 62 patients (30 men and 32 women, mean age 71.1± 4.5 years and mean educational level 11.5 ± 1 years). They were admitted to the Clinic of Neurology from Craiova between January 2015 – January 2016 for Parkinson’s disease. All the patients met the diagnostic criteria for Parkinson′s disease. In this study we included only patients in stage I and II on Hoehn and Yahr scale. 35 patients were in stage I and 27 patients in stage II. The patients were treated with levo-dopa monotherapy or dopaminergic agonists monotherapy. We have also included in our study a control group composed of 70 control subjects with the same range of educational level and age. To assess the cognitive state we tested the patients using Cambridge Cognitive Examination (CAMCOG) and the revised version of the Addenbro-oke′s Cognitive Examination (ACE-R) at baseline, after 6 months and one year later. For the statistical analysis, we used Student test (p<0.05 statistically considerable). At baseline the patient group showed a mean CAMCOG score 92.5 and a mean ACE-R score 89.6. The control subjects showed a mean CAMCOG score 94.3 and a mean ACE-R score 90.2. One year later the patient group showed a mean CAMCOG score 83.5 and 84.3 mean ACE-R score. The control group showed a mean CAMCOG score 90.2 and mean ACE-R score 88.3. The patients with PD showed a greater cognitive impairment than the control subjects. We observed that the patients in stage II Hoehn and Yahr had a greater cognitive impairment than patients in stage I. We have also seen in patient group a cognitive decline across every ACE-R and CAMCOG cognitive domain.

Keywords

• cognitive impairment
• parkinson’s disease
• camcog
• ace-r