Dopamine Effect on Inhibitory Control

• Status: Recruiting
• Trial end date: 2022-10-01
• Target enrollment: 0
• Participant gender: All

Summary

The effect of Levodopa medication on inhibitory control in Parkinson's patients is extremely debated despite the fact that this has potential clinical and therapeutic implications. A key confounding factor of many previous studies is that they did not take the disease duration in consideration. In fact, in moderate-to-advanced stages of Parkinson dopaminergic drugs could not produce a clear effect because too few dopaminergic cells for the drugs to operate on survived. Hence, in this study, we will compare the performance in the stop signal task in early-stage versus moderate-to-advanced stages Parkinson's patients both in ON and in OFF medication. In addition, to have a baseline measure of inhibitory control we will compare patient's performances with that of age-matched subjects.

• Phase: N/A
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers?: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Details

• Lead Sponsor: Giovanni Mirabella
• Treatments: Dopamine; Dopamine Agents; Dopamine Agonists; Levodopa

Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

1. Right-handedness (as assessed by the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory)

2. Being in stable treatment with the administration of L-dopa and dopamine agonists (i.e. not having motor fluctuations and/or dyskinesia)

3. Having a Hoehn & Yahr score between 1.5 and 3

Exclusion Criteria:

1. Presence of severe sensory deficits

2. Presence of overt signs of dementia (a. mini-mental state examination, MMSE must be ≥24; b. intelligence quotient ≥75).

3. Comorbidity with other psychiatric disorders that might interfere with task execution (i.e. attentional disorders).

4. Presence of severe tremor or rigidity of the right arm in the OFF medication state.