Effects of Depression and Parkinson's Disease on Cognitive Functioning

Abstract

This study compared the performance of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with and without depression, patients with depression alone, and normal control subjects on a cognitive screening instrument, the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (DRS) to evaluate the influences of depression and Parkinson's disease on cognition. PD affects overall level of cognitive functioning and, to a lesser extent, DRS Initiation/Perseveration, Construction, and Attention. Diminished memory was primarily related to depression. Treatment of depression may ameliorate aspects of cognitive dysfunction in the PD patient with depression.

Cognitive and neuroanatomical correlates of neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson's disease: A systematic review

“…Several studies have demonstrated an association between depression and cognitive impairments in PD patients [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. There are, however, a few other studies that did not detect a significant association between depression and variance in cognitive deficit in PD (See table 1) [31][32][33][34].…”

“…Letter Fluency, Abstract Reasoning and Card Sorting Test [22], Category Fluency Test and TMT [29], setshifting and response inhibition [40], Frontal Assessment Battery and Stroop test [27]. As for deficits in other cognitive domains, earlier studies have reported an association between depression and poorer scores on tasks of attention (assessed by a subtest of the Dementia Rating Scale and Digit Span Forward) [25,26], short-term memory (measured by Digit Span Forward and Backward) [30], and memory which was assessed by the Word-list recall and recognition test [22], Hopkins Verbal Learning Test [24,41], a subtest of the Dementia Rating Scale [26] and the Pattern Recognition Memory Task [29]. In addition, another study indicated a relationship between depression and poorer performance on a range of cognitive tasks including those testing executive function (Trail Making Test), memory (Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test) and visuospatial skills (Rey-Osterreith Complex Figure Test) [42].…”

CBT for the treatment of depression in Parkinson’s disease: a promising nonpharmacological approach

“…Difficulties with memory, attention, and language are also common in PD and are frequently aggravated by depression [8,59,60,61,62]. This widespread cognitive impairment has been noted despite the absence of clinically significant cognitive decline [8].…”

Unhappiness, health and cognitive ability in old age

“…Blazer & Williams, 1980 ;Griffiths et al 1987 ;Austin et al 2001 ;Norman et al 2002). Nearly all have compared normal elderly against psychiatric patients or individuals whose self-report scores indicate risk of clinically significant depression.…”