Do parkinsonian patients have trouble telling lies the neurobiological basis of deceptive behaviour

Abstract

Parkinsons disease is a common neurodegenerative disorder with both motor symptoms and cognitive deficits such as executive dysfunction. Over the past 100 years, a growing body of literature has suggested that patients with Parkinsons disease have characteristic personality traits such as industriousness, seriousness and inflexibility. They have also been described as 'honest', indicating that they have a tendency not to deceive others. However, these personality traits may actually be associated with dysfunction of specific brain regions affected by the disease. In the present study, we show that patients with Parkinsons disease are indeed 'honest', and that this personality trait might be derived from dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex. Using a novel cognitive task, we confirmed that patients with Parkinsons disease (n 32) had difficulty making deceptive responses relative to healthy controls (n 20). Also, using resting-state 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose PET, we showed that this difficulty was significantly correlated with prefrontal hypometabolism. Our results are the first to demonstrate that the ostensible honesty found in patients with Parkinsons disease has a neurobiological basis, and they provide direct neuropsychological evidence of the brain mechanisms crucial for human deceptive behaviour. © 2009 The Author(s)2009This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2009 Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved.