Exogenous Effects of Standard Medical Care (Dopamine) on Motor Learning of an Upper Limb Task in Parkinson Disease
Exogenous Effects of Standard Medical Care (Dopamine) on Motor Learning of an Upper Limb Task in Parkinson Disease
The study determines whether standard medical care (dopamine) affects learning and retention of an upper limb feeding task in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) and whether training on the feeding task generalises to performance on an untrained upper limb buttoning task. Half the participants will train on the feeding task after they have taken their first dose of dopamine for the day (i.e. "on" medication state), while the other half will train on the same feeding task before taking their first daily dose of dopamine (i.e. "off" medication state).
Parkinson disease (PD) is an age related neurodegenerative disorder with symptomatic declines in motor function due to a loss of dopaminergic neurons within the basal ganglia.
Ironically, treatment with exogenous dopamine-replacement medication (e.g. levodopa) may have positive effects on existing motor skills such as handwriting or walking, but may have detrimental effects on the learning of motor skills necessary for effective rehabilitation.
Although dopamine medications are routinely prescribed to replace lost dopamine in the sensorimotor areas of the striatum, they may actually be "overdosing" the associative striatum, a candidate neuroanatomical correlate for motor learning. To date, however, this 'overdose' hypothesis has not been widely tested, given that few studies of motor learning in PD have reported or controlled for whether individuals were tested "on" or "off" their dopamine replacement medication.
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