Dopamine enhances willingness to exert effort for reward in Parkinson's disease.

ABSTRACT: Parkinson's disease (PD) is traditionally conceptualised as a disorder of movement, but recent data suggest that motivational deficits may be more pervasive than previously thought. Here, we ask whether subclinical deficits in incentivised decision-making are present in PD and, if so, whether dopaminergic therapy ameliorates such deficits. We devised a novel paradigm in which participants decided whether they were willing to squeeze a hand-held dynamometer at varying levels of force for different magnitudes of reward. For each participant, we estimated the effort level at which the probability of accepting a reward was 50% - the effort 'indifference point'. Patients with PD (N = 26) were tested ON and OFF their usual dopaminergic medication, and their performance compared to those of age-m

SUBMITTER: Chong TT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4533227 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature