Martina Piefke*, Hannah Vogel and Stefan Troche
The treatment of cognitive impairments in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) poses a challenge on the therapy of the disorder. The current study examines the effects of a computer based cognitive training in patients with PD. 13 individuals with PD (3 females, 10 males) and 16 healthy controls (8 females, 8 males) participated in the study. They underwent a 6 week cognitive rehabilitation program, focusing on attention, working memory, and executive functions. We measured (i) pre and post-training cognitive performance with standard neuropsychological tests and (ii) improvement in the training tasks across the intervention. In both groups, performance improved significantly within all training modules (p<.001). A significant increase of performance was evident from pre to post-intervention untrained neuropsychological measures of working memory (p<.001). Moreover, correlational analyses showed that enhancement in each trained task was accompanied by improvement in the same cognitive domain in untrained neuropsychological tests. To our knowledge this study is the first providing evidence for a transfer of cognitive improvement in trained tasks to untrained neuropsychological measures in patients with PD. We propose that patients with PD will benefit from the inclusion of cognitive training in medical treatment of the disorder.
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