Well, one of the problems we have in Huntington’s disease compared with many other neurodegenerative diseases is the absence of instruments, validated specific instruments, to capture the whole complex set of cognitive issues that people with Huntington’s are dealing with. So we have several screening instruments for cognitive aspects for Parkinson’s and for Alzheimer’s or for FTD, but not for Huntington’s...
Well, one of the problems we have in Huntington’s disease compared with many other neurodegenerative diseases is the absence of instruments, validated specific instruments, to capture the whole complex set of cognitive issues that people with Huntington’s are dealing with. So we have several screening instruments for cognitive aspects for Parkinson’s and for Alzheimer’s or for FTD, but not for Huntington’s. Several years ago, we developed a specific cognitive scale for Parkinson’s disease, which demonstrated pretty good psychometric properties, differentiating patients with normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia associated with Parkinson’s. And although they are not the same disease, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s from a cognitive and neuropathological perspective share maybe more things than Huntington’s with Alzheimer’s. So here we tested not just how the PDCRS works in Huntington’s disease, but also performance on the PDCRS, what it tells us about what is happening in the brain of people with Huntington’s disease. For several years, many people considered that everything happening in the brain of Huntington’s was the result of striatal atrophy. Now we know that’s not true. There’s the whole brain suffering from the disease, and the PDCRS demonstrated a pretty nice correlation with the biological events happening at the level of the brain of people with Huntington’s disease. So it’s a pretty good instrument to be used in Huntington’s. Also, the name of the scale is Parkinson’s disease, but not just because of the psychometric properties, but because it shows us in a super elegant manner what is happening in the brain of these people.
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