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. 2010 Aug;25(5):455–460. doi: 10.1177/1533317510370956

Executive Functions Deficit in Parkinson’s Disease With Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment

Mariya Petrova 1, Margarita Raycheva 2, Yavor Zhelev 3, Latchezar Traykov 4
PMCID: PMC10845324  PMID: 20484747

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that onset of dementia in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is preceded by a phase known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Different clinical subtypes of MCI in PD were found. The objective of this study was to investigate whether patients with PD diagnosed with amnestic MCI (aPD-MCI) have also subtle deficits in other cognitive domains and especially in attention/executive functions and, therefore to clarify whether all subcomponents of executive control are equally affected in aPD-MCI. We investigated 23 patients with aPD-MCI (modified Petersen’s criteria) and 25 normal controls. Relative to controls, the aPD-MCI group showed significant deficits with reference to tasks that encompass various aspects of attention/executive functions, including Trail Making Test, Stroop test, Modified Card Sorting Test, and digit span backward, as well as phonemic and semantic verbal fluency. This suggests that executive dysfunction is consistently presented in PD with MCI, even in ‘‘amnestic’’ PD-MCI due to cortical—subcortical dysfunction.

Keywords: Parkinson’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, cognition, executive functions

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Contributor Information

Mariya Petrova, Department of Neurology, Medical University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Margarita Raycheva, Department of Neurology, Medical University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Yavor Zhelev, Department of Neurology, Medical University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Latchezar Traykov, Department of Neurology, Medical University, Sofia, Bulgaria, traykov_l@yahoo.fr .

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