Journal of Alzheimers Disease & Parkinsonism
Open Access

Research Article

Clinical Correlates of RBD in Early Parkinson Disease

Astrid Haram^1,2*, Erik Hessen^3,4, Eirik Auning^1,6, Ane Lovli Stav³, Bradley Boeve⁵, Carl Fredrik Eliassen^3,4, Eyvind Rugland³, Abdolreza Esnaashari³, Tormod Fladby^1,3 and Dag Aarsland^7,8

¹Institute of Clinical Medicine, Campus Ahus, University of Oslo, Norway

²Ostfold Central Hospital, Department of Geriatric Psychiatry, Fredrikstad, Norway

³Akershus University Hospital, Department of Neurology, Lorenskog, Norway

⁴Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway

⁵Department of Neurology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA

⁶Akershus University Hospital, Department of Geriatric Psychiatry, Lørenskog, Norway

⁷Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centre, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Novum, 141 86 Stockholm, Sweden

⁸Centre for Age-Related Diseases, Stavanger University Hospital, 4000 Stavanger, Norway

Corresponding Author:

Astrid Haram
Ostfold Central Hospital
Department of Geriatric Psychiatry
(Alderspsykiatrisk seksjon), 1603 Fredrikstad
Tel: +47 93026972
E-mail: astrid.haram@gmail.com

Received date: November 04, 2014; Accepted date: December 17, 2014; Published date: December 24, 2014

Citation: Haram A, Hessen E, Auning E, Stav AL, Boeve B et al. (2014) Clinical Correlates of RBD in Early Parkinson Disease. J Alzheimers Dis Parkinsonism 4:174. doi:10.4172/2161-0460.1000174

Copyright: © 2014 Haram A et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Objective: Knowledge of the cognitive performance associated with REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) in newly diagnosed Parkinson disease (PD) patients is limited. We thus wanted to explore 1) the frequency of RBD in patients with PD at a relatively early stage and 2) cognitive performance associated with RBD in PD. We hypothesized that RBD would be associated with cognitive impairment in PD.

Methods: 29 non-demented patients recently diagnosed with PD (disease duration<5 years, Hoehn and Yahr stage <2.5 and no dementia) were recruited. The diagnosis of PD was supported by dopamine transporter SPECT. RBD was diagnosed based on standardized clinical interview and confirmed by polysomnography. Overall cognition was assessed by screening tests including the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), and neuropsychological tests of memory, language, executive, attentional and visuospatial functions tests were performed.

Results: 13 patients (45%) had probable RBD. There were no significant differences between PD with and without RBD in any of the neuropsychological tests, but a numerically lower performance was observed in the PD RBD group on memory tests

Conclusions: RBD is common even in early PD without dementia, but was not found to be associated significantly with cognition.

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