| Summary: | 碩士 === 高雄醫學大學 === 行為科學研究所 === 82 ===
Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the common neurological disorders for the middle-agers. The ctiology is the degencration of the dopaminergic ncurons projected from substantia nigra to striatum, which results in motor dysfunctions, i.e. trcmor, rigidity, bradykinesia, etc. Beside motor dysfunctions, PD patients also have deviated spontaneous eye blink, blinking habituation and cognitive functions.
The motor dysfunctions, eye blinking responses and cognitive functions of the PD patient may be due to degeneration of the nigro-striatal dopamine activity. Therefore, the present study intends to correlate these three activities through experiments and tests on the PD patients, and to understand the possible mechanism involved in the PD clinical symptoms.
The results show that the PD with domentia patients perform poorly on cognitivc tests. These include attention, language ability, spatial perception, memory, calculation ability and reasoning. Conversely, the PD without dementia patients show lower scores on delay memory and judgement ability only.
On the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the PD with dementia patients show significantly deficit in errors (especially for the non-perseverative errors). categories and level. There is no differences between PD without dementia patients and the control. llowever, PD patients show significantly less spontaneous eye blinking frequency, aud less eye blink habituation compare to the control. These abnormal responses are more pronounccd in the PD with dementia patients.
There is a significant correlation between PD patient's motor dysfunction and cognitive deficits on the delay memory only. This is possibly due to the nigro-striatal dopamiergic system degeneration; however, the cognitive deficts may be influenced by other neuro-transmittcr systemc besidc dopaminc.
There is a significant correlation between spon-taneous eye blinking and eye blinking habituation response. However, these are not significantly correlated with the motor dysfunctions. This indicates that the eye blinking activity is affected by dopaminergic system, however, this may be mediated via one of the dopamine system: nigro-striatal, mesolimbic, or mesocortical dopaminrgic systems. This suggests that the pathology of PD is complex and is not just nigro-striatal dopaminergic system degeneration (which is afecting the motor activity only); further study on the pathology of PD is worth pursuing.
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