The success of dopaminergic interventions in the treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD) symptoms has been significant. Nevertheless, a misdiagnosis of PD can cause psychological trauma and unnecessarily expose patients to PD drugs. Additionally, as new, and possibly neuroprotective, drugs become available for the treatment of PD, early and accurate diagnosis will become increasingly important. As the diagnosis of PD is usually based on subjective clinical assessment of overt symptomatology [1], the need for an objective and reproducible battery of diagnostic tests is great. Medical imagery offers some hope for the objective diagnosis of PD (e.g. 18F-dopa positron emission tomography [2]), but these techniques tend to be expensive, and inaccessible to patients living in remote areas. What is truly needed is a low-cost objective test battery that might be used in situations where (a) movement disorder specialists are unavailable to render expert diagnoses, and (b) medical imaging is inaccessible.
Montgomery et al. [3, 4] have published one of the better known objective PD batteries, incorporating measures of motor performance, olfaction, and mood. The aggregate of all subtests of this battery has demonstrated good diagnostic properties, with a sensitivity of approximately 70%, and a specificity of approximately 90%. Given that the primary symptoms of PD are motoric [1], however, it is interesting to note that the sensitivity of the motor task in this PD battery is approximately 50% [3, 4], indicating that diagnoses based solely on this subtest are not much better than chance. As the predictive power of a battery increases with the addition of each valid and independent subtest, it is important to evaluate motor performance paradigms that may produce better predictive validity.
The global slowing that is consistently demonstrated by PD patients suggests that measures of cognitive or motor speed are logical methods for obtaining quantitative measurements of PD severity. As reaction time (RT) and movement time (MT) have repeatedly been demonstrated to show substantive and significant deficits in PD populations (for a review of this literature, see Gauntlett-Gilbert et al. [5]), these indicators are (by definition) capable of distinguishing individuals with PD from healthy participants. Despite this fact, however, the motor subtest of the PD battery described by Montgomery et al. [3, 4] remains the only significant attempt at evaluating diagnostic accuracy with these chronometric indicators. Although this subtest measures both RT and MT, the task is performed in a biomechanically complicated fashion that requires the participant to move his/her hand in an arc (i.e. wrist flexion and extension) to aim at LED targets. This test assesses both rigidity and bradykinesia within the same task – and while this is a conceptually defensible measurement decision, the resulting inter-subject variability may overwhelm group differences, and confound diagnostic accuracy. It is, therefore, worth examining the extent to which a simpler paradigm might be used to distinguish PD patients from healthy participants.
The goal of this study, therefore, is to evaluate the diagnostic properties of a choice reaction time task that uses a simple external response console (i.e. a "button box"), similar to other similar response time tasks extant within the PD literature.