Alteraciones neuropsicológicas y de la fluencia verbal en la Enfermedad de Parkinson

Neuropsychological functions have been studied in a group of 96 patients with Parkinson's disease and 42 controls matched by gender, age, educational level and verbal intelligence. The results show that patients with Parkinson's disease, as a whole, show deficits in visuospatial functioning as well as in memory and frontal performance. However, these sorts of deficits are not presented in all the patients at a time. The cluster's analysis indicates that the neuropsychological alterations in the Parkinson's group can be distributed in three subgroups. On a first group we could see a generalized cognitive decline pattern; in a second group we could not find any deficit at all; and finally, in a third group we could observe specific deficits on visuospatial and frontal functions. Verbal fluency showed the same pattern as frontal impairment and we could find significant differences related to this variable between the patients with Parkinson's disease and the controls. Depression symptoms were found on a 50% of the patients. We can conclude, therefore, that the neuropsychological and language assessment in patients with Parkinson's disease is an important issue to take into consideration as it may help in knowing the impairment pattern and also in improving the patients day to day functioning as well as it's quality of life.