Neuropsychiatric Traits Associated with Refractory Impulse Control Disorder in Parkinson's Disease

Impulse control disorder (ICD) in Parkinson's disease (PD) is a critical nonmotor symptom with personality or neuropsychiatric traits contributing to ICD.

This study aimed to identify predictive traits for persistent or paradoxical aggravation of ICD after dopamine agonist substitution therapy for ICD in PD.

We conducted a case-control study using a database of a multicenter intervention trial for ICD in PD. The poor-outcome group was defined by showing paradoxical increases in ICD behaviors after the substitution of dopamine agonists with levodopa. We analyzed the pre-intervention personality traits associated with the poor outcome and also evaluated the risk traits for refractory ICD using a receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis.

The poor-outcome group showed higher levels of anger expression (p =0.007) and obsessive-compulsive traits (p =0.009) compared with the good-outcome group at the pre-intervention state. In the ROC curve analysis, the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory showed the highest area under the curve with 80.0% sensitivity and 74.3% specificity in discriminating against the poor-outcome group.

Our results suggest that assessment of obsessive compulsiveness may be useful for predicting the refractoriness of ICD behaviors in planning an interventional treatment for ICD in PD.