Deficient sustained attention to response task and P300 characteristics in early Huntington’s disease
DOI: 10.1007/s00415-011-6334-0
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Summary
This study investigates attentional control deficits in early Huntington’s disease (HD) and premanifest HD, addressing inconsistent findings in previous literature regarding the nature and extent of cognitive impairment in these populations. The researchers aimed to determine if both manifest and premanifest gene carriers exhibit impaired attentional control, measured via behavioral performance on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) and neurophysiological markers (P300 event-related potentials). The SART was selected because it minimizes motor interference, allowing for a clearer assessment of cognitive processes like inhibition and sustained attention. The study included 17 subjects with early manifest HD, 12 with premanifest HD, and 15 healthy controls. Participants performed the SART, where they responded to numbers 1–9 but withheld responses for the number 3. Simultaneous EEG recordings captured P300 amplitudes and latencies. Statistical analyses, including ANCOVA with age as a covariate, compared error rates, reaction times (RT), and P300 characteristics across groups. Results indicated that early HD patients exhibited significant attentional control deficits. They made significantly more Go errors (omissions) and had slower overall reaction times compared to controls and premanifest subjects. Crucially, early HD patients showed a distinct RT pattern following errors: they experienced significant post-error slowing, taking several trials to return to pre-error performance levels, whereas controls and premanifest subjects recovered immediately. This pattern suggests an inability to effectively resume task engagement after an error. Neurophysiologically, early HD patients displayed reduced P300 amplitudes during No-go trials, indicating lower allocation of attentional resources. In contrast, the premanifest HD group showed no significant attentional or inhibitory deficits compared to controls, although trends suggested slightly worse performance. The findings conclude that attentional control is deficient in early manifest HD, characterized by an inability to maintain focus and recover efficiently from errors. This deficit appears to be cognitive rather than purely motor, as evidenced by the specific error-related RT patterns and P300 abnormalities. The absence of deficits in the premanifest group suggests that attentional control impairments may emerge closer to clinical onset or are too subtle to detect at this stage. These results highlight the importance of assessing attentional control in HD care, as cognitive decline may cause significant distress and functional impairment independent of motor symptoms.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-08-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| enrich | success | semantic_scholar | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-nvidia | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 10 | 2026-08-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-nvidia on 2026-08-10; verification: verified.
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