A comparison of montreal cognitive assessment between patients with visual hallucinations and without visual...

Visual hallucination (VH) is closely associated with cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD). The aim of this study is to analyze the domain of cognitive impairment related to the VH by analyzing cognition in PD.

Twenty-six of 58 patients had VH (PD-VH), whereas 32 patients had no hallucinations (PD-NH); patients assigned to the PD-VH on the basis of having at least one VH per week for one month before participation in the study. All of the patients were administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Korean test (MoCA-K). We analyzed the differences in cognition between PD-VH and PD-NH.

The Hoehn-Yahr (HY) stage and the Beck Depression Inventory version I (BDI) scores in PD-VH were significantly different from those in PD-NH. After adjusting for the HY stage and BDI, the language domain of the MoCA-K cognitive domains presents a significant difference between PD-VH and PD-NH.

Sentence processing and naming as the composition of the language domain in the MoCA-K have been associated in common with posterior cortical dysfunction. Although our result shows that the language domain of MoCA-K is sensitive to cognitive deficit in PD-VH patients, it needs further neuroimaging analysis for certifying the relationship between language impairment and posterior cortical deficit as the pathophysiology of PD-VH.