Cognitive decline in Huntington's disease in the Digitalized Arithmetic Task (DAT)

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Clinical Neurology

Background:

• Huntington's disease (HD) research requires sensitive cognitive tasks for tracking longitudinal decline in small patient cohorts.
• The digitized arithmetic task (DAT) was developed to assess inner language and executive functions efficiently within approximately 4 minutes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the psychometric properties and clinical utility of the digitized arithmetic task (DAT) in early-stage Huntington's disease (HD).
• To determine if DAT can detect cognitive deterioration over one year and correlate with neuroimaging findings in HD patients.

Main Methods:

• Assessed DAT psychometric properties across three languages and four European sites in 77 early-stage HD patients and 57 controls.
• Conducted a one-year follow-up with 48 HD patients and 34 controls, including MRI brain imaging at baseline and follow-up.
• Utilized linear mixed models and Pearson correlations to analyze cognitive performance, clinical assessments, and neuroimaging data.

Main Results:

• HD patients exhibited significantly lower accuracy and longer response times on DAT compared to controls at baseline.
• DAT demonstrated good to excellent test-retest reliability for response time and acceptable reliability for accuracy in HD patients.
• DAT, alongside other established measures, detected cognitive decline within one year in HD patients and correlated with striatal atrophy over time.

Conclusions:

• The digitized arithmetic task (DAT) is a fast, reliable, motor-free, and multilingual tool for detecting cognitive decline in small HD cohorts.
• DAT's ability to correlate cognitive changes with striatal atrophy makes it a valuable potential endpoint for future clinical trials in HD and other neurodegenerative diseases.