Publications by authors named "Ida Unmack Larsen"

People with Parkinson's disease (PwP) experience a variety of symptoms and fluctuations in these, which they have to cope with every day. In tailoring a person-centered treatment to PwP there is a lack of knowledge about the association between pre-dominant coping behaviors and clinical markers among PwP. To describe and compare specific clinical markers between 6 suggested coping behaviors.

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Social cognitive functions such as Theory of Mind, empathy and emotion recognition can be impaired in dementia spectrum disorders, especially in diseases with prominent frontal dysfunction. The Emotion Hexagon test (EHT) is a short test of basic emotion recognition. As with other social cognitive tests, normative data for this test is sparse.

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Background: Due to high prevalence of cognitive impairment in Huntington's disease (HD) gene mutation carriers, even before onset of motor symptoms, cognitive screening is important for the optimal management of patients. The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) are widely used, but the validity for HD has only been evaluated in few studies with important limitations.

Objective: To evaluate the discriminative validity of the MMSE and the MoCA for the assessment of cognitive dysfunction in HD gene mutation carriers, independently of motor manifestation and furthermore, to report estimated probabilities for cognitive impairment with different score ranges on the MMSE and the MoCA.

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Objective: Huntington's disease (HD) is characterized by motor symptoms, psychiatric symptoms and cognitive impairment in, inter alia, executive functions and social cognition. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between subjective feeling of psychological distress using a self-report questionnaire and performances on tests of executive functions and social cognition in a large consecutive cohort of HD patients.

Method: 50 manifest HD patients were tested in social cognition and executive functions and each answered a self-report questionnaire about current status of perceived psychological distress (the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R)).

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Huntington's disease (HD) is associated with risk for developing psychiatric symptoms. Vulnerability or resilience to psychiatric symptoms may be associated with personality traits. This exploratory study, aimed to investigate personality traits in a large cohort of HD carriers and at risk gene-expansion negative individuals (HD non-carriers), exploring whether carrying the HD gene or growing up in an HD family influences personality traits.

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Objective: Emotion recognition has been widely studied in Huntington disease (HD), but only a few studies have investigated more complex social cognition and, when so, exclusively in manifest HD. The present study sought to investigate social-cognitive functions in a large, consecutive cohort of premanifest and manifest HD gene expansion carriers using tests assessing sarcasm detection, theory of mind (ToM), and emotion recognition.

Method: Fifty manifest, 50 premanifest HD gene expansion carriers, and 39 at risk gene expansion negative healthy controls were included.

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Executive functions (EF) and psychomotor speed (PMS) has been widely studied in Huntington's disease (HD). Most studies have focused on finding markers of disease progression by comparing group means at different disease stages. Our aim was to investigate performances on nine measures of EF and PMS in a group of premanifest and manifest HD-gene expansion carriers and to investigate which measures were most sensitive for assessment of individual patients by analyzing frequencies of impaired performances relative to healthy controls.

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