Capturing Subjective Cognitive Decline with a new combined index in low education patients with Parkinson’s Disease

Research overview

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Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD), refers to self-reported cognitive decline with normal global cognition. We aimed to capture SCD among low educated patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) by a newly established indicator. There were total of 64 PD patients with low education levels (education ≤ 12 years) recruited in this study. The presence of SCD was determined based on a Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale Part I (1.1) score ≥ 1. The prevalence of SCD in PD patients was 43.75% (28/64). Low educated PD-SCD patients had higher scores on the Non-Motor Symptoms Scale (NMSS), Parkinson’s Fatigue Scale (PFS), Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), as well as higher scores on the UPDRS-I and UPDRS-II, compared to PD patients without SCD. Multivariate binary regression confirmed the significant association between PD-SCD and MoCA-executive abilities/attention/language. A score of 12 or less on the combined index had a sensitivity of 73.9% and a specificity of 76.2% for diagnosing PD-SCD. Most importantly, the newly combined index can help capture these low educated PD-SCD patients, with an AUC of 0.867, and is expected to assist clinicians in earlier identification of PD patients.

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