An Impairment of Recognizing Emotional Facial Expressions in Parkinson's Disease

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Parkinson's disease (PD), one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders, is characterized by motor and non-motorsymptoms. We evaluated the impairment in recognizing emotional facial expressions in PD patients using morphing techniquesand investigated the related structures with brain perfusion on single photon emission CT (SPECT) using the threedimensionalstereotactic surface projection (3D-SSP) technique. Finally, we demonstrated that PD patients displayed a prominentdegree of hypoperfusion in the occipital lobe, while also demonstrating an impairment in recognizing the facial emotionsfor both anger and happiness.The ability to recognize the facial emotions for happiness has been shown to be closely associated with a decreased cerebralblood flow (CBF) in the right occipital lobe.In PD patients, an impairment in recognizing emotional facial expressions might be partially due to an occipital cortical dysfunction.As the present study is a preliminary one, further studies are thus needed to elucidate the mechanism of such impairmentsin recognizing emotional facial expressions in PD patients.