The Effect of Neurodegeneration on Visuomotor Behavior in Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease

The early stages of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) involve deterioration of specific (visuo)motor functions. The aim of the current study was to investigate differences in visuomotor behavior between age-matched groups of 17 patients with AD, 17 patients with PD, and 20 healthy control subjects across three eye-hand-coordination tasks of different cognitive complexity. In two of three tasks, timing and execution parameters of eyes and hand significantly differed between groups. Timing and execution parameters of the eyes and hands could potentially give a quantitative description of disease specific deficits in the spatial and temporal domains and may serve as a tool to monitor disease progression in AD and PD populations.