Compensatory neural mechanisms in cognitively unimpaired Parkinson disease. Annals of neurology Poston, K. L., YorkWilliams, S., Zhang, K., Cai, W., Everling, D., Tayim, F. M., Llanes, S., Menon, V. 2016; 79 (3): 448-463

Abstract

Cognitive impairments in Parkinson's disease (PD) are thought to be caused in part by dopamine dysregulation. However, even when nigrostriatal dopamine neuron loss is severe enough to cause motor symptoms, many patients remain cognitively unimpaired. It is unclear what brain mechanisms allow these patients to remain cognitively unimpaired despite substantial dopamine dysregulation.31 cognitively unimpaired PD participants OFF dopaminergic-medications were scanned using fMRI while they performed a working memory task, along with 23 controls. We first compared the PD_OFF medication group with controls to determine whether PD participants engage compensatory frontostriatal mechanisms during working memory. We then studied the same PD participants ON dopaminergic-medications to determine whether these compensatory brain changes are altered with dopamine.Controls and PD showed working memory load-dependent activation in the bilateral putamen, anterior-dorsal insula, supplementary motor area, and anterior cingulate cortex. Compared to controls, PD_OFF showed compensatory hyper-activation of bilateral putamen and posterior insula, and machine learning algorithms identified robust differences in putamen activation patterns. Compared to PD_OFF, PD_ON showed reduced compensatory activation in the putamen. Loss of compensatory hyper-activation ON dopaminergic-medication correlated with slower performance on the working memory task and slower cognitive speed on the Symbol Digit Modality Test.Our results provide novel evidence that PD patients maintain normal cognitive performance through compensatory hyper-activation of the putamen. Dopaminergic-medication down-regulates this hyper-activation and the degree of down-regulation predicts behavior. Identifying cognitive compensatory mechanisms in PD is important for understanding how some patients maintain intact cognitive performance, despite nigrostriatal dopamine loss. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

View details for DOI 10.1002/ana.24585

View details for PubMedID 26696272