Progressive cognitive decline is a feature of Huntington's disease (HD), an inherited neurodegenerative movement disorder. Comprehensive neuropsychological testing is the 'gold standard' to establish cognitive status but is often impractical in time-constrained clinics. The study evaluated the utility of brief cognitive tests (MMSE and MoCA), UHDRS measures and a comprehensive neuropsychological tests battery in monitoring short-term disease progression in HD. Twenty-two manifest HD patients and 22 matched controls were assessed at baseline and 12-month. A linear mixed-effect model showed that although the HD group had minimal change in overall global cognition after 12 months, they did show a significant decline relative to the control group. The controls exhibited a practice effect in most of the cognitive domain scores over time. Cognitive decline at 12-month in HD was found in the executive function domain but the effect of this on global cognitive score was masked by the improvement in their language domain score. The varying practice effects by cognitive domain with repeated testing indicates the importance of comparing HD patients to control group in research trials and that cognitive progression over 12 months in HD should not be judged by changes in global cognitive score. The three brief cognitive tests effectively described cognition of HD patients on cross-sectional analysis. The UHDRS cognitive component, which focuses on testing executive function and had low variance over time, is a more reliable brief substitute for comprehensive neuropsychological testing than MMSE and MoCA in monitoring cognitive changes in HD patients after 12 months.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 6. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 November 2025.
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Altmetric has tracked 31,439,095 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 74th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 504 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 38.9. This one is in the 22nd percentile – i.e., 22% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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