What are some of the cognitive symptoms you observe in patients with Parkinson’s disease?
It was taught in the past that Parkinson’s disease patients compared with Alzheimer’s disease patients are less likely to have memory or language deficits and more likely to have deficits in other domains. For patients that have memory deficits, it is less likely to be an encoding deficit, as seen with Alzheimer’s disease, but more of a retrieval deficit, which was thought to reflect more subcortical dysfunction. However, accumulating research has found that Parkinson’s disease patients can have impairments in a range of cognitive domains, including memory, attention, executive abilities, and visual-spatial abilities. This has been one major shift in the perception of the disease. The other major shift is the recognition that, whereas cross-sectional studies have demonstrated that ~30% of Parkinson’s disease patients have dementia, more careful longitudinal studies1,2 have shown that the overwhelming majority of patients with Parkinson’s disease do develop dementia if followed long eno
