Dalléry Romain, Fraisse Nicolas, Cléret de Langavant Laurent, Youssov Katia, Morgado Graça, Massart Renaud, Schubert Robin, Reilmann Ralf, Jacquemot Charlotte, Bapst Blanche, Busse Monica, Craufurd David, Rosser Anne, Lunven Marine, Bachoud-Lévi Anne-Catherine
Département d'Etudes Cognitives, École normale supérieure, PSL University, 75005 Paris, France.
Institut Mondor de Recherche Biomédicale, Equipe NeuroPsychologie Interventionnelle, University Paris Est Creteil, INSERM U955, F-94010 Creteil, France.
Brain Commun. 2024 Dec 9;7(1):fcae440. doi: 10.1093/braincomms/fcae440. eCollection 2025.
The prevalent belief that individuals with Huntington's disease exhibit selfish behaviour, disregarding the thoughts, feelings and actions of others, has been challenged by patient organizations and clinical experts. To further investigate this issue and study whether participants with Huntington's disease can pay attention to others, a joint memory task was carried out in patients with Huntington's disease with and without a partner. This study involved 69 participants at an early stage of Huntington's disease and 56 healthy controls from the UK, France and Germany, who participated in the international Repair-HD multicentre study (NCT03119246). Participants completed a semantic categorization task across three categories: animals, fruits and vegetables and manufactured objects. They performed the task either alone (Alone condition) or with the examiner acting as a partner (Pair condition). In the Pair condition, the participant was assigned one category, their partner was assigned another and one category was left unassigned. Afterwards, participants engaged in a surprise free recall task to remember as many words as possible. Words not assigned to anyone were considered socially irrelevant in contrast to the ones assigned to the participant and to the partner. Both groups demonstrated the expected self-prioritization effect, recalling their assigned words better than their partner's or unassigned words in both conditions. Additionally, a joint memory effect was observed, with better recall for the partner's assigned words than the unassigned words in the Pair condition (controls: difference = 0.45, < 0.001; participants with Huntington's disease: difference = 0.34, < 0.001). Socially relevant words were thus better recalled than irrelevant words. The number of recalled words correlated with cognitive performance (all -values < 0.05) and MRI analysis revealed a negative correlation between the joint memory effect and right orbitofrontal grey matter density in participants with Huntington's disease. These findings challenge the notion that individuals with Huntington's disease display selfish behaviours because of disinterest in others. They show the ability to process information about their partners, implying that their social difficulties may arise from factors other than social cognition deficits. This opens the door for more ecological assessments of social cognition in patients with Huntington's disease.
认为亨廷顿舞蹈症患者表现出自私行为、无视他人想法、感受和行为的普遍观念，受到了患者组织和临床专家的质疑。为了进一步研究这个问题，并探究亨廷顿舞蹈症患者是否能够关注他人，针对有伴侣和没有伴侣的亨廷顿舞蹈症患者开展了一项联合记忆任务。这项研究涉及来自英国、法国和德国的69名处于亨廷顿舞蹈症早期阶段的参与者以及56名健康对照者，他们参与了国际Repair-HD多中心研究（NCT03119246）。参与者完成了一项跨三个类别的语义分类任务：动物、水果和蔬菜以及人造物品。他们要么独自完成任务（单独条件），要么由考官作为搭档一起完成任务（配对条件）。在配对条件下，给参与者分配一个类别，给其搭档分配另一个类别，剩下一个类别不分配。之后，参与者进行了一项突击自由回忆任务，尽可能多地记住单词。与分配给参与者及其搭档的单词相比，未分配给任何人的单词被认为与社交无关。两组都表现出预期的自我优先效应，即在两种条件下，回忆自己分配的单词都比回忆搭档分配的单词或未分配的单词更好。此外，还观察到了联合记忆效应，即在配对条件下，回忆搭档分配的单词比回忆未分配的单词更好（对照组：差异 = 0.45，<0.001；亨廷顿舞蹈症患者：差异 = 0.34，<0.001）。因此，与社交相关的单词比无关单词更容易被回忆起来。回忆单词的数量与认知表现相关（所有 -值<0.05），MRI分析显示，亨廷顿舞蹈症患者的联合记忆效应与右侧眶额灰质密度呈负相关。这些发现挑战了这样一种观念，即亨廷顿舞蹈症患者由于对他人不感兴趣而表现出自私行为。它们表明患者有处理关于其搭档信息的能力，这意味着他们的社交困难可能源于社会认知缺陷以外的因素。这为对亨廷顿舞蹈症患者的社会认知进行更生态化的评估打开了大门。
