Pragmatic communication skills in patients with Parkinson's disease.
BACKGROUND
Pragmatic communication abilities may depend on intact frontal lobe systems. Independent evidence suggests that some persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired on measures of frontal lobe function.


OBJECTIVE
We therefore hypothesized in Study 1 that pragmatic communication skills would be impaired in some persons with PD and would be linked to frontal dysfunction in these patients. In Study 2 we hypothesized that PD patients would be unaware of their pragmatic communication deficits.


METHODS
In Study 1 we administered tests of pragmatic abilities and frontal lobe functioning to twenty-two persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 10 healthy controls. In Study 2 we obtained self-ratings of pragmatic abilities from 11 PD patients and then checked these self-ratings against ratings of these same abilities by the patient's spouses.


RESULTS
We found in Study 1 that patients with PD were: (a) significantly impaired on measures of pragmatic communication abilities, especially in the areas of conversational appropriateness, turn-taking, prosodics and proxemics, and that this impairment was significantly related to measures of frontal lobe function. In study 2 we found that PD patients overestimated their own abilities relative to spousal ratings of those abilities and thus were unaware of the extent of their problems with pragmatic social communication skills.


CONCLUSIONS
We conclude that pragmatic social communication skills are impaired in PD and that this impairment may be related to frontal lobe dysfunction.
McNamara
Patrick
P
Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, MA, USA. mcnamar@bu.edu
Durso
Raymon
R
D000368:Aged; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology; D003147:Communication Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000150:complications*; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D012919:Social Behavior