Altered awareness of cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson's disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies: A systematic review

Objectives Altered awareness of cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms is a common feature of neurodegeneration, which can significantly impact on quality of life, medication concordance and personal safety. Elucidating how awareness is affected by common alpha-synucleinopathies therefore has significant clinical relevance. We performed a systematic review of the literature on awareness of cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson's disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Methods Searches of PubMed and Web of Science were carried out, using keywords and MeSH subheadings, limited to papers in English dealing with humans. The terms "Parkinson's" or "Lewy body" were used to denote the disease of interest, combined with either "agnosia", "anosognosia", "insight", "metacognition", or "neuropsychology" to denote the neuropsychological area of interest. Results 21 publications investigating awareness of cognitive symptoms, and 18 publications on awareness of neuropsychiatric symptoms were identified. The large majority focused on Parkinson's disease rather than Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Cognitively intact people with Parkinson's disease may over-report cognitive symptoms, whilst those with cognitive impairment under-report symptoms. Awareness of neuropsychiatric symptoms is likely to decline over time, particularly in those with progressive cognitive impairment. Conclusions Altered awareness of cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms is common in Parkinson's disease. Symptom awareness varies significantly between individuals, and appears to be influenced by mood and global cognitive functioning, with executive functioning specifically implicated. There are gaps in our understanding of how dopaminergic medications influence symptom awareness, and a need for longitudinal studies of how awareness changes over time in Parkinson's disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies.