Cognição social na doença de Parkinson e na paralisia supranuclear progressiva: uma investigação neuropsicológica

Abstract

The differential diagnosis between Parkinson's Disease (PD) and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) is a clinical challenge. There is evidence that patients with PD and PSP have deficits in theory of mind (ToM) and facial emotion recognition, two social cognition (SC) skills. Although many studies have already investigated cognitive-behavioral aspects in both PD and PSP, the literature is scarce regarding the direct comparison between patients with PD and PSP in measures of SC. Therefore, we studied eighteen patients with PD, twenty patients with PSP and twenty-three healthy controls. The three groups were matched for age, sex and education, and none of them had a history of other neurological or psychiatric disorders. Each participant was submitted to a neurological assessment and to a neuropsychological examination, including the “Mini-SEA” battery for SC, which assesses recognition of facial emotions and TdM (faux-pas test). PSP patients performed worse than controls in the ToM and emotion recognition tests. PD patients differed from controls only in the TdM test. There was no difference in the Facial Emotion Recognition test between the DP and PSP groups. Patients with PSP performed worse than patients with PD in the faux-pas test. These differences were maintained even after controlling for the degree of executive dysfunction. The present results suggests that the assessment of SC contributes to the differential diagnosis between PD and PSP.