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Brain Advance Access originally published online on March 31, 2009
Brain 2009 132(5):1386-1395; doi:10.1093/brain/awp052
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© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Do parkinsonian patients have trouble telling lies? The neurobiological basis of deceptive behaviour

Nobuhito Abe1, Toshikatsu Fujii1, Kazumi Hirayama1, Atsushi Takeda2, Yoshiyuki Hosokai1, Toshiyuki Ishioka1, Yoshiyuki Nishio1, Kyoko Suzuki1, Yasuto Itoyama2, Shoki Takahashi3, Hiroshi Fukuda4 and Etsuro Mori1

1 Department of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan 2 Department of Neurology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan 3 Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan 4 Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiology, Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

Correspondence to: Nobuhito Abe, Department of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-1 Seiryo-machi, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8575, Japan E-mail: abe-n{at}mail.tains.tohoku.ac.jp

Parkinson's disease is a common neurodegenerative disorder with both motor symptoms and cognitive deficits such as executive dysfunction. Over the past 100 years, a growing body of literature has suggested that patients with Parkinson's disease have characteristic personality traits such as industriousness, seriousness and inflexibility. They have also been described as ‘honest’, indicating that they have a tendency not to deceive others. However, these personality traits may actually be associated with dysfunction of specific brain regions affected by the disease. In the present study, we show that patients with Parkinson's disease are indeed ‘honest’, and that this personality trait might be derived from dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex. Using a novel cognitive task, we confirmed that patients with Parkinson's disease (n = 32) had difficulty making deceptive responses relative to healthy controls (n = 20). Also, using resting-state 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose PET, we showed that this difficulty was significantly correlated with prefrontal hypometabolism. Our results are the first to demonstrate that the ostensible honesty found in patients with Parkinson's disease has a neurobiological basis, and they provide direct neuropsychological evidence of the brain mechanisms crucial for human deceptive behaviour.

Key Words: Parkinson's disease; prefrontal cortex; neuropsychology; PET; executive function

Abbreviations: ADAS = Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale, ; FDG = 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose, ; MMSE = Mini-Mental State Examination, ; OSEM = ordered subset expectation maximization, ; WMS-R = Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised,

Received November 12, 2008. Revised January 20, 2009. Accepted February 4, 2009.


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