[Assessment of memories for public events in Parkinson's disease]

Many patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have subtle cognitive impairment which often contribute to explain their cognitive complaint. In the literature, neuropsychological studies showed few difficulties for memory and executive functions. We report the performance of 12 PD patients and 12 controls subjects for public events memory. On a 30-item French scale battery (EVE-30), their scores were lower than those of the controls in 4 tasks: evocation, questions, datation and date recognition. They also had difficulties to perform a chronological classification of 8 events. No difference was found between PD patients and control subjects in the events recognition task. Flash bulb memories (FBM) were less frequent in PD patients than in control subjects: 23% versus 34% of cases. A correlation was observed between the scores on the EVE total scale, questions scale, FBM scale and the score on the anterograde recall. Scores on the EVE total scale, questions scale were correlated to the scores on the executive function (initiation) scale. PD patients without dementia seemed to have a low cognitive impairment of retrograde public event memory for episodic and semantic components. Specific difficulties were observed for date evocation and recognition, and chronological classification. These very global deficits to recuperate information can be related to the striatal dopamine depletion which affects the prefrontal functions.