Can Parkinson’s Disease Cause Short Term Memory Problems?
Saturday, January 8th, 2011 at
12:38 pm
A question from miss helen: can parkinson’s disease cause short term memory problems?
No 1 answer:
Answer by shenzoe
My Mother died of Parkinson’s but while she was alive I did not notice any memory problems, she was just a little slow at getting things out.
If you know better then please let us know below.
Tagged with: cause • disease • memory • Parkinsons • problems • Short • term
Filed under: Parkinsons
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Yes, it results in memory loss.(short term).
Read the below..
Parkinson disease affects movement (motor symptoms). Typical other symptoms include disorders of mood, behavior, thinking, and sensation (non-motor symptoms). Individual patients’ symptoms may be quite dissimilar; progression is also distinctly individual. There are four major dopamine pathways in the brain; the nigrostriatal pathway, referred to above, mediates movement and is the most conspicuously affected in early Parkinson’s disease. The other pathways are the mesocortical, the mesolimbic, and the tuberoinfundibular. These pathways are associated with, respectively: volition and emotional responsiveness; desire, initiative, and reward; and sensory processes and maternal behavior. Reduction in dopamine along the non-striatal pathways is the likely explanation for much of the neuropsychiatric pathology associated with Parkinson’s disease.
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Motor symptoms
The cardinal symptoms are:
tremor: 4-7Hz tremor, maximal when the limb is at rest, and decreased with voluntary movement. It is typically unilateral at onset. This is the most apparent and well-known symptom. However, an estimated 30% of patients have little perceptible tremor; these are classified as akinetic-rigid.
rigidity: stiffness; increased muscle tone. In combination with a resting tremor, this produces a ratchety, “cogwheel” rigidity when the limb is passively moved.
bradykinesia/akinesia: respectively, slowness or absence of movement. Rapid, repetitive movements produce a dysrhythmic and decremental loss of amplitude.
postural instability: failure of postural reflexes, which leads to impaired balance and falls.
(The mnemonic TRAP (Tremor; Rigidity; Akinesia/bradykinesia; Postural instability) can be used to remember these symptoms.)
Other motor symptoms include:
Gait and Posture Disturbances:
Shuffling: gait is characterized by short steps, with feet barely leaving the ground, producing an audible shuffling noise. Small obstacles tend to trip the patient
Decreased arm swing: a form of bradykinesia
Turning “en bloc”: rather than the usual twisting of the neck and trunk and pivoting on the toes, PD patients keep their neck and trunk rigid, requiring multiple small steps to accomplish a turn.
Stooped, forward-flexed posture. In severe forms, the head and upper shoulders may be bent at a right angle relative to the trunk (camptocormia).
Festination: a combination of stooped posture, imbalance, and short steps. It leads to a gait that gets progressively faster and faster, often ending in a fall.
Gait freezing: “Freezing” is another word for akinesia, the inability to move. Gait freezing is characterized by inability to move the feet, especially in tight, cluttered spaces or when initiating gait.
Dystonia: abnormal, sustained, painful twisting muscle contractions, usually affecting the foot and ankle in PD patients. This causes toe flexion and foot inversion, interfering with gait. Foot dystonia can be a presenting symptom of PD, especially in younger patients.
Speech and Swallowing Disturbances
Hypophonia: soft speech. Speech quality tends to be soft, hoarse, and monotonous.
Festinating speech: excessively rapid, soft, poorly-intelligible speech.
Drooling: most likely caused by a weak, infrequent swallow and stooped posture.
(Non-motor causes of speech/language disturbance in both expressive and receptive language: these include decreased verbal fluency and cognitive disturbance especially related to comprehension of emotional content of speech and of facial expression[1]
Dysphagia: impaired ability to swallow. Can lead to aspiration, pneumonia, and death.
Other motor symptoms:
fatigue (up to 50% of cases);
masked facies (a mask-like face also known as hypomimia), with infrequent blinking;[2]
difficulty rolling in bed or rising from a seated position;
micrographia (small, cramped handwriting);
impaired fine motor dexterity and coordination;
impaired gross motor coordination;
Poverty of movement: overall loss of accessory movements, such as decreased arm swing when walking, as well as spontaneous movement.
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Non-Motor Symptoms
Mood disturbances:
depression: occurs in 40-70% of cases; 20% of depression cases are major depressive disorder; severity and persistence of depression is positively associated with executive dysfunction and dementia;
anxiety or panic attacks
Note: 70% of individuals with Parkinson’s disease diagnosed with pre-existing depression go on to develop anxiety; 90% of Parkinson’s disease patients with pre-existing anxiety subsequently develop depression);
apathy or abulia: abulia translates from Greek as the absence or negative of will; apathy is an absence of feeling or desire
Cognitive disturbances:
slowed reaction time; both voluntary and involuntary motor responses are significantly slowed.
executive dysfunction, characterized by difficulties in: differential allocation of attention, impulse control, set shifting, prioritizing, evaluating the salience of ambient data, interpeting social cues, and subjective time awareness. This complex is present to some degree in most Parkinson’s patients; it may progress to:
dementia: a later development in approximately 20-40% of all patients, typically starting with slowing of thought and progressing to difficulties with abstract thought, memory, and behavioral regulation.
memory loss; procedural memory is more impaired than declarative memory. Prompting elicits improved recall.
medication effects: some of the above cognitive disturbances are improved by dopaminergic medications, while others are actually worsened [3]
Sleep disturbances:
Excessive daytime somnolence;
Initial, intermediate, and terminal insomnia;
Disturbances in REM sleep: disturbingly vivid dreams, and REM Sleep Disorder, characterized by acting out of dream content;
Sensation disturbances:
impaired visual contrast sensitivity, spatial reasoning, colour discrimination, convergence insufficiency (characterized by double vision) and oculomotor control
dizziness and fainting; usually attributable orthostatic hypotension, a failure of the autonomous nervous system to adjust blood pressure in response to changes in body position
impaired proprioception (the awareness of bodily position in three-dimensional space)
loss of sense of smell (anosmia),
pain: neuropathic, muscle, joints, and tendons, attributable to tension, dystonia, rigidity, joint stiffness, and injuries associated with attempts at accommodation
Autonomic disturbances:
oily skin and seborrheic dermatitis;
urinary incontinence, typically in later disease progression
constipation and gastricdysmotility: severe enough to endanger comfort and even health
altered sexual function: characterized by profound impairment of sexual arousal, behavior, orgasm, and drive is found in mid and late parkinson disease. Current data addresses male sexual function almost exclusively.
Parkinsonism describes the common symptoms of Parkinson’s disease: tremor, rigidity, akinesia or bradykinesia and postural instability.
The differential diagnosis or list of potential causes for this disease includes: Parkinson’s disease (and variations such as Parkinson’s with Alzheimer’s, vascular Parkinson’s, etc.), multiple system atrophy, progressive supranuclear palsy, medications (e.g. antipsychotics, metoclopramide), diffuse Lewy body disease, corticobasal degeneration, normal pressure hydrocephalus, gait disorder in the elderly, and overexposure to substances such as carbon monoxide, cyanide, manganese, and MPTP.
Yes, especially as it progresses. It turns out that Parkinson’s messes with people’s brains a lot, and it can affect short-term memory. However, it is not an extremely common side-effect.
nrsebone’s answer above includes some differential diagnoses. If you look at her list, there are a few that could contribute to short-term memory loss including: multiple system atrophy, progressive supranuclear palsy, medications, Lewy body disease, corticobasal degeneration, and normal pressure hydrocephalus.
The victims of disease suffer progressive muscular malfunction centered in dopamine(DA) and acetylcholine(Ach) mediated neurons in the substantia nigra and corpus striatum of the brain which control fine skeletal movement. In these areas dopamine modulates the musclestimulatory and modulatory actions of acetylcholine and GABA, respectively. The destruction eventually reaches 80-90% and the symptoms of the disease appear due to the unmodulated and excessive stimulation of motor neurons. The condition can frequently start with resting hand tremors and involuntary mouth and finger movement, progressing to a shuffling gait and poverty of movement (bradykinesia), eventually leading to muscle rigidity and difficulty in initiating movement (akinesia). Victims have a tendency to fall forwards or backwards and cannot catch themselves. 50% will also develop dementia.