Cognitive deficits and psychiatric morbidities are commonly detected in dystonia. Psychiatric disturbances are of particular clinical concern as they not only contribute to poor quality of life and disease associated burden, but also exacerbate motor and cognitive symptoms. Bilateral deep brain stimulation of the globus pallidus internus improves motor symptoms in treatment-resistant dystonia, but its implications for non-motor manifestations are poorly understood. Improved prediction of cognitive and neuropsychiatric outcomes is important in deep brain stimulation (DBS) research and we aim to assess the latter through established assessment tools. We document the cognitive and neuropsychiatric profiles in 11 primary and 10 secondary dystonia patients attending our DBS clinic. We performed routine multidisciplinary assessments including a comprehensive battery of neuropsychometric tests and detailed neuropsychiatric evaluations. Post-operative assessment outcomes are reported for three patients in case series. The main cognitive deficit was on the Brixton test of spatial anticipation in primary dystonia. Background medical history included psychiatric illness in 38.1% of the patients with 76% of patients having mood abnormalities confirming elevated psychiatric morbidity in this population. Depressive illness was more prominent in primary, whereas clinically relevant histories in secondary dystonia were varied. Of the 21 patients three were able to perform on selected tests due to extensive limitations of their dystonia. No obvious alteration in intellectual functioning following DBS surgery relative to performance at the time of initial assessment was observed. The frequency of individual impairments suggests that difficulties associated with dystonia are likely to be of clinical relevance to cognitive functions in the majority of patients. In particular, current findings suggest that executive difficulties related to inductive processes and spatial learning may be a common in primary dystonias. Psychiatric disturbances demand recognition as a central aspect of dystonia as they contribute to overall disease burden, poor quality of life and exacerbated motor disabilities. The available evidence provides overwhelming suggestion that vulnerability to depression is inherent to the dystonia phenotype.
Keywords: dbs; neuropsychiatry; neuropsychology.