The influence of depression on cognition in parkinson's disease: A pattern of impairment distinguishable from alzheimer's disease

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Article abstract-Conflicting reports about the effects of depression on cognition in Parkinson's disease (PD) are difficult to interpret because they are based on small sample sizes and confound depression with other variables. We found that a sample of 45 PD patients with current depression was cognitively more impaired than a sample of 45 PD patients without current depression matched for age, education, gender, age at disease onset, disease duration, and disease severity. The domains of cognition impaired in the two PD groups (compared with 45 age-, education-, and gender-matched controls) overlapped considerably, but only the depressed PD group had impaired memory relative to the control group. Our comparison of 22 depressed PD patients and 22 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients matched for overall severity of cognitive impairment, age, education, and gender indicated that the depressed PD group performed significantly worse on visuoconstructive tasks and marginally worse on conceptualization tasks. In contrast, the AD group performed significantly worse than the depressed PD group on memory tasks. Together, our results suggest that depression has a negative impact on cognition (and, in particular, memory) in PD, and that the pattern of this cognitive impairment is distinguishable from that associated with AD. © 1995 American Academy of Neurology.

Publication Date

1-1-1995

Publication Title

Neurology

ISSN

00283878

E-ISSN

1526632X

Volume

45

Issue

4

First Page

672

Last Page

676

PubMed ID

7723954

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1212/WNL.45.4.672

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS