Brain Advance Access originally published online on June 15, 2005
Brain 2005 128(10):2250-2259; doi:10.1093/brain/awh569
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain.
A functional MRI study of automatic movements in patients with Parkinson's disease
1 Human Motor Control Section, Medical Neurology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA and 2 Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, Department of Neurology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital University of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
Correspondence to: Mark Hallett, MD, Bldg 10, Rm 5N226, 10 Center Drive MSC 1428, Bethesda, MD 20892-1428, USA E-mail: hallettm{at}ninds.nih.gov
Patients with Parkinson's disease have great difficulty performing learned movements automatically. The neural contribution to the problem has not been identified. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of movement automaticity in Parkinson's disease patients. Fifteen patients with Parkinson's disease were recruited. Three patients were finally excluded because they could not achieve automaticity. The remaining 12 patients were aged from 52 to 67 years, with a mean age of 61.2 years. Controls included 14 age-matched normal subjects. The subjects were asked to practise four tasks, including two self-initiated, self-paced sequences of finger movements with different complexity until they could perform the tasks automatically. Two dual tasks were used to evaluate automaticity. For dual tasks, subjects performed a visual letter-counting task simultaneously with the sequential movements. Twelve normal subjects performed all sequences automatically. All patients performed sequences correctly; 12 patients could perform the simpler sequence automatically; and only 3 patients could perform the more complex sequence automatically. fMRI results showed that for both groups, sequential movements activated similar brain regions before and after automaticity was achieved. No additional activity was observed in the automatic condition. In normal subjects, many areas had reduced activity at the automatic stage, whereas in patients, only the bilateral superior parietal lobes and left insular cortex were less activated. Patients had greater activity in the cerebellum, premotor area, parietal cortex, precuneus and prefrontal cortex compared with normal subjects while performing automatic movements. We conclude that Parkinson's disease patients can achieve automaticity after proper training, but with more difficulty. Our study is the first to demonstrate that patients with Parkinson's disease require more brain activity to compensate for basal ganglia dysfunction in order to perform automatic movements.
Key Words: automatic movement; brain activity; dual task; fMRI; Parkinson's disease
Abbreviations: fMRI = functional magnetic resonance imaging; MMSE = Mini-Mental State Examination; SMA = supplementary motor area; SPM = statistical parametric mapping; UPDRS = Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale
Received February 2, 2005. Revised April 27, 2005. Accepted May 18, 2005.
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