Article Text
Abstract
Objective To investigate salivary cortisol samples in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with and without impulsive compulsive behaviours (ICB) during a risk task.
Methods Salivary cortisol levels were measured in 13 PD patients without ICB (PD−ICB) and in 15 PD patients with ICB (PD+ICB) before, after medication and throughout the day, and were compared with results with 14 healthy controls. All participants also performed a gambling task to assess risk taking behaviour.
Results Significantly higher diurnal cortisol levels were found in the PD−ICB group compared with healthy controls but no differences were seen between the PD+ICB and the control group. Increased cortisol levels were significantly correlated with increased risk taking in PD+ICB patients but no interaction was found in the PD−ICB group.
Conclusions The findings are in keeping with previous studies which have linked low cortisol levels with antisocial behaviour. The higher cortisol levels during the risk task in the PD+ICB group are consistent with reports in pathological gamblers during gambling and addicts during drug abuse. The results support the hypothesis that cortisol plays an important role in risk taking in ICBs.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
BBA and AL contributed equally to this study.
Funding This work was supported in part by the Intramural Program of the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health.
Competing interests AL serves as historical section editor for Movement Disorders; has served as a consultant to Genus; has served on advisory boards for and received honoraria from Novartis, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, MEDA Pharmaceuticals Inc, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Ipsen, Lundbeck Inc, Allergan Inc, Orion Pharma UK Ltd and Eisai Inc; and has received research support from the PSP Association and the Reta Lila Weston Trust.
Ethics approval This study was conducted with the approval of the the Joint UCL/UCLH Committees on the Ethics of Human Research.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.