Alerting network alteration in isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder patients with mild cognitive impairment.

OBJECTIVE

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was found in 30-50% of the isolated REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) patients. Furthermore, it is known that patients with Parkinson's disease have attention network defects. Given that iRBD is known to be the prodromal disease of α-synucleinopathies, our aim was to investigate whether there are attention network dysfunctions in iRBD patients following the presence of MCI.

METHODS

14 healthy controls, 48 iRBD patients, 24 with MCI and 24 without MCI, were included in this study. Attention network task (ANT) was used to assess alerting, orienting, and executive control networks. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral performances were recorded during the ANT. Parietal N1 and P3 components were analyzed to find effects of the three attention networks.

RESULTS

IRBD patients without MCI showed neuropsychological, behavioral, and ERP results similar to those of healthy controls. On the other hand, iRBD patients with MCI showed a general decline in cognitive domains with no alerting effect (controls, p = 0.043; iRBD-noMCI, p = 0.014; iRBD-MCI, p = 0.130) while preserving orienting and executive control effect. Furthermore, iRBD patients with MCI had impairments in executive function and verbal memory domains, compared to iRBD patients without MCI.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings indicate that when cognition is reduced to MCI levels in iRBD patients, the attention network, especially the alerting component, is impaired. The attention network and cognition, on the other hand, can be preserved in iRBD patients due to the compensatory mechanism.