Objective: This study aims to explore CATEX sensitivity to detect early cognitive deficits in Huntington’s disease (HD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) Italian population.

Background: PD and HD share specific neural similarities, mainly at the Fronto-Striatal level [1]. CATEX is a language tool developed in France [2], which investigates visual naming categorization [62 exemplars (EX) and 31 categories (CAT)] by controlling for executive loads. It has been observed that this test is able to detect early cognitive deficits in pre-symptomatic HD (pre-HD) [2].

Method: Overall, 106 participants were recruited: 10 HD patients, 48 PD with normal cognition (PD-NC), 28 PD with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) and 20 subjects with MCI to control for cognitive load. Clinical, motor (UPDRS, UHDRS), cognitive and CATEX evaluation were collected. The Italian cut-offs for the CATEX were applied for this study [3]. One-way ANOVA test (Bonferroni corrected) was used for statistical analysis.

Results: All the subgroups were matched for age and education except for HD which were the youngest group. Significant altered performance was present in both CAT and EX subscores for MCI (p<0,01; p<0,05 respectively), PD-MCI (p<0,001; p<0,05 respectively) and HD (p<0,001; p<0,05 respectively).
Post-Hoc within subgroup comparisons showed significant differences in CAT performance between PD-NC vs. PD-MCI and MCI (p<0,001 for both). Overall, HD group showed the lowest score at CAT compared all the other groups (p<0,005).

Conclusion: Our results showed that CATEX is a sensitive tool to detect the MCI status, but its performance does not discriminate PD pathology. Interestingly, early stage HD Italian patients, showed similar CAT performance as in French pre-HD population. Future investigation on bigger sample and pre-HD Italian patients needed to confirm French data.

References: [1] Pillon, B., Deweer, B., Michon, A., Malapani, C., Agid, Y., Dubois, B. (1994). Are explicit memory disorders of progressive supranuclear palsy related to damage to striatofrontal circuits? Comparison with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s diseases. Neurology 44 (7) 1264; DOI: 10.1212/WNL.44.7.1264 [2] Jacquemot, C., Schramm, C., Lavisse, S., Nazir, M., Sliwinski, A., Gaura, V., Remy, P., Bachoud-Lévi, A-C. (in prep). Toward a cognitive marker for Huntington disease: coupling language and executive functions. [3] Gandolfi, T., Garon, M., Vicentin, S., Arcara, G., Jaquemont, C., Antonini, A., Semenza, C., Biundo, R. (in prep). Italian validation of CATEX: Category-Exemplars language test. Submitted.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/performance-at-the-category-exemplars-language-test-catex-in-parkinsons-disease-and-huntingtons-disease-italian-population/