Do Parkinson patients have trouble telling lies?
 

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/...bstract/awp052

Brain Advance Access published online on March 31, 2009
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awp052
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Do parkinsonian patients have trouble telling lies? The neurobiological basis of deceptive behaviour
Nobuhito Abe1, Toshikatsu Fujii1, Kazumi Hirayama1, Atsushi Takeda2, Yoshiyuki Hosokai1, Toshiyuki Ishioka1, Yoshiyuki Nishio1, Kyoko Suzuki1, Yasuto Itoyama2, Shoki Takahashi3, Hiroshi Fukuda4 and Etsuro Mori1
1 Department of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan 2 Department of Neurology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan 3 Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan 4 Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiology, Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan



Parkinson's 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 Parkinson's 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 Parkinson's 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 Parkinson's 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 Parkinson's disease has a neurobiological basis, and they provide direct neuropsychological evidence of the brain mechanisms crucial for human deceptive behaviour.

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i cannot tell a lie?
 

well good ....right? lol hypometabolism...we're too slow to lie. Thanks madelyn that's interesting.

:) paula

Thanks Madelyn!
very interesting! For a change, hypometabolism is associated with what I consider good! Or being honest is a metabolic disorder!!!??

Girija

Do Parkinson patients have trouble telling lies?
 

So, would it be impossible for a sociopath (who lies involuntarily) to have Parkinsons? How does that work? I'm afraid to take it any further.

dunno pacem
 

anybody here that used to be a sociopathic liar? share.

paula

:confused: Would they be telling the truth?

I'm not sure I agree with this study too much. Personality traits can also be learned from your envinronment. If you have kids, you have seen how they can start acting like their friends.

I'm up in the air on this one.

Hmmm. Interesting.
 

I, for one, am a terrible liar. So much so that I quit trying many years ago. And if you are honest, then you don't have to keep notes. :)

Exactly Rick!

I don't have Pd...but no way could I tell fibs and try and keep them straight. I have never figured out how people can do that. Could be why they tend to get caught. :wink:

Lying
 

I agree, we move and think slower. Or does our self-editing function disappear? Sophia from Golden Girls?

One line in the study is interesting: "...we show that patients with Parkinson's disease are indeed ‘honest’, and that this personality trait might be derived from dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex"

Honesty is dysfunctional?

Well I'll agree the Pope was not a liar but ADOLPH HITLER?? Bob C

lies and PD
 

Perhaps extreme honesty could be labelled a "biomarker" for PD. My husband has never been able to tell a lie; I have learned not to ask questions to which I do not want a real answer--ie "does this dress make me look fat?" The character trait of honesty is one of the reasons I fell in love with my husband. After 39 yrs, I am re-evaluating.

"O what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decieve!" Shakespere (?)

For shame, Madelyn! We must accept the bad with the good.

Robert

Is it true?
 

I find it impossible to lie even posting in this thread.:D

Seriously, though, if this is true then PD should be a prerequisite for public office.:)

Ok..don't throw me under the bus...but didn't MJF kinda fib about having PD for years? :o

<----monkey runs and hides...

I cannot lie, but even growing up I have been this way, and presumably I did not have Parkinson's then.

Is there anyone who has noticed a difference since they have been diagnosed with Parkinson's in their ability to tell a lie?

Or is there something in our brains that has made us be honest people and also somehow made us more susceptible to Parkinson's?

I read the Methods portion and it made no sense to me. Also, from the Discussion:

"In conclusion, our results provide new evidence that damage to the prefrontal cortex disrupts the processes involved in making deceptive responses in Parkinson's disease patients. It appears that the ‘honesty’ of patients is caused by an impaired ability to deceive others that results from brain dysfunction caused by the disease.

However, there are some limitations of the present study that should be borne in mind for future studies. First, the present study examined only the processes associated with executive control during deception. The participants were instructed to tell a lie, which cannot be viewed as being the same as deception in real life.

The neural bases of genuine deception or immoral lying should be investigated further in both healthy individuals and brain-damaged patients.

Second, it remains a possibility that the association between difficulty deceiving others and prefrontal dysfunction may not be specific to Parkinson's disease patients, and further studies are needed to examine whether patients with other neurological disorders affecting the prefrontal cortex show similar deficits (see Spence and Kaylor-Hughes, 2008).

Third, the present study investigated only patients with mild Parkinson's disease of short duration. Whether our claim is true of patients in general is an important issue to be pursued. Finally, it is also important to determine how (and when) the brain pathology derived from Parkinson's disease causes specific personality traits together with explicit cognitive deficits. A longitudinal assessment with detailed neuropsychological assessment and multimodal neuroimaging in Parkinson's disease patients is required."

dear bandido man
 

Dear one,
Hitler did not have PD...
he had neurosyphilis !
please - check the history books...:Tip-Hat:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
http://kimel.net/syphilitic.html
http://www.ushmm.org/

I beleive It.
 

When my husband and I broke our first lease on an apartment by one month, I still cleaned it as clean as I would had I been expecting my damage deposit back, even knowing we broke the lease. In our townhome, where we lived after the apartment, we received our damage deposit. I took it over to the apartment manager's office and returned. They were amazed and a little annoyed for giving them more paperwork.

My problem is I am always trying to find lies and uncover them if they are going to hurt people I care about. Makes it hard to keep friends as I am paranoid and suspect consperecies everywhere. Lost many friends that way.

My sister is the same. After I had my first son, she told me I hadn't lost much of the fat in my stomach. She said she was just being honest and could not understand why I was hurt and angry.
:mad:

deception is a bad thing
 

rules don't apply to celebrities...lol actually i am wondering if it's a bit mixed in with a lack of inhibition. i'm too honest - too much information....

tho i can sound like i'm lying because when asked questions, i think of more than one way to answer it ...stumble over my tongue and come off sounding guilty. i also think we lack credibility because we jump from topic to topic. But even tho i did hide my pd, looking back, it forced me to tell many lies.....probably was only fooling myself. now my body would give me away if i tried to get tangled in a lie.

i do think we don't think fast enough to lie....it's hard enough - wonder if we also have the reverse problem....tending to believe more than others and that might be contributing to the strength of the placebo effect on us. We've been calling for honesty from many people over the years, but considering our economy, i'd say no one is listening.

paula

madelyn - funny!

:Ponder: ah! He was just acting!

well that's very true !

paula