Affiliations: [a] School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia | [b] Department of Neurology, Monash Medical Centre, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Correspondence:
[*]
Correspondence to: Julie C. Stout, School of PsychologicalSciences, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia. Tel.: +61 3 99053987; Fax: +61 3 99053948; julie.stout@monash.edu.
Note: [1] Eleftheria Vaportzis is now a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Life Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Abstract:
Background: Past research has found cancellation tasks to be reliable markers of cognitive decline in Huntington’s disease (HD).
Objective: The aim of this study was to extend previous findings by adopting the use of a dual task paradigm that paired cancellation and auditory tasks.
Methods: We compared performance in 14 early stage HD participants and 14 healthy controls. HD participants were further divided into groups with and without cognitive impairment.
Results: Results suggested that HD participants were not slower or less accurate compared with controls; however, HD participants showed greater dual task interference in terms of speed. In addition, HD participants with cognitive impairment were slower and less accurate than HD participants with no cognitive impairment, and showed greater dual task interference in terms of speed and accuracy.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that dual task measures may be a better measure of cognitive processing in HD compared with more traditional measures.
