title: The concept of bradyphrenia.
abstract: The historical interplay between akinesia, bradyphrenia and psychomotor retardation is reviewed. It is concluded that bradyphrenia is a common accompaniment to the motor disabilities of Parkinson's disease and consists of slowness of thought, impaired attention and motivation, lack of spontaneity, inflexibility and forgetfulness. Impaired attentional extra-dimensional set-shifting may be responsible for many of these problems. Some clinical overlap occurs between Parkinson's disease, severe depressive illness and obsessional-compulsive disorder and it is proposed that there may be shared biological disturbances involving basal-ganglia-limbic-frontal circuits in the three conditions.
authors.affiliation: National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, London.
authors.forename: A J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Lees
mesh_terms: D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D009770:Obsessive Behavior / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology*; D011596:Psychomotor Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology