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Updated: Dec 7, 2025
Whole-brain Segmentation and Change-point Analysis of Anatomical Brain MRI—Application in Premanifest Huntington's Disease
Published on: June 9, 2018
Time will tell: Decision making in premanifest and manifest Huntington's disease
Beatrice Heim1, Marina Peball1, Carsten Saft2
1Department of Neurology, Medical University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.
Objective:
To investigate cognitive flexibility in premanifest and manifest Huntington's disease (HD).
Background:
HD is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor, cognitive, and behavioral abnormalities with typical motor symptoms. In this study, we wanted to assess decision making in premanifest (pre-HD) and manifest HD patients.
Methods:
A total of 77 non-demented subjects including 29 pre-HD, 22 manifest HD patients, and 26 healthy controls (HC) were included. We stratified the pre-HD group based on their estimated years to disease onset into a far (FAR, n = 13) and a near (NEAR, n = 16) group. Furthermore, participants performed the Montreal cognitive assessment battery (MoCA), the trail making task part A and B (TMT A, TMT B), the Symbol digit modalities test (SDMT), and the beads task.
Results:
In the beads task, HD patients gathered less information than all other groups (all p-values < .001). Furthermore, the NEAR group gathered less information than the FAR group (p < .001) and HC (p = .001). There was no difference between the HC and the FAR group (p = 1.0). In the TMT and the SDMT, HD patients were slower than all other groups (all p-values < .01) but there were no other significant differences.
Conclusions:
Decision making with a higher degree of uncertainty may be an early neuropsychological sign to indicate the disease process prior to reaching criteria for motor diagnosis of HD.
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