‘Real-life’ hippocampal-dependent spatial memory impairments in Huntington's disease

Hippocampal and striatal volumes correlate with spatial memory impairment in Huntington’s disease

“…The Virtual House mimics the spatial demands of everyday life (Glikmann‐Johnston, Carmichael, et al., 2019), and tests both egocentric and allocentric spatial processing. The task was programmed using 3D Studio MAX (Autodesk, Inc., San Rafael, CA, USA) and Macromedia Director MX version 9.0 (Macromedia Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA; see https://osf.io/ezhfp/quickfiles for task materials).…”

“…Participants were required to draw a floor plan of the house, illustrating its general outline, the spatial relations between the rooms, and their relative dimensions (Figure 2a). The outcome of this component was scored qualitatively, using the consensus of two raters who described the spatial distortions of the plan (see Glikmann‐Johnston, Carmichael, et al., 2019 for scoring criteria).…”

“…Findings of spatial memory impairment in Huntington's disease (HD), an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder (McColgan & Tabrizi, 2018), have been accumulating since the early 1970s (for review see Glikmann‐Johnston et al., 2019). People with HD have difficulties remembering the topographical configuration of environments, locating objects and landmarks within environments, and navigating efficiently from one place to another (Begeti et al., 2016; Glikmann‐Johnston et al., 2019; Harris et al., 2019; Labuschagne et al., 2016; Majerova et al., 2012). Despite the mounting evidence of spatial memory impairments in HD, and the importance of these abilities for day‐to‐day functioning, the domain of spatial memory has received little focus in characterizations of the cognitive phenotype of HD, most likely as a result of the field's clear emphasis on the primary pathology of HD within the striatum (Papoutsi et al., 2014).…”

“…Thus, we cannot assume that hippocampal and striatal involvement in route recognition and spatial working memory, as shown by Voermans and Possin for example, will be observed in other spatial memory components or in the spatial memory domain as a whole. In HD, the relationship between brain pathology and spatial memory components of object location memory and recall of plan drawing is unknown, although these two spatial memory components were shown to be significantly impaired in people with manifest and premanifest HD (Begeti et al., 2016; Glikmann‐Johnston, Carmichael, et al., 2019).…”

“…This investigation has the potential to strengthen the relevance of spatial memory to HD by linking the cognitive impairments to HD neuropathology. We selected spatial memory tasks that we have recently shown to be sensitive to HD, including the Virtual House (Glikmann‐Johnston, Carmichael, et al., 2019), Paired Associates Learning (PAL) from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB ® [Cognitive assessment software], Cambridge Cognition, 2019, Cambridge, UK), and the Rey–Osterrieth Complex Figure Test (RCFT; Osterrieth, 1944; Rey, 1941). MRI volumetry was used to examine the relationship between hippocampal and striatal structures (caudate nucleus and putamen) and components of spatial memory.…”