Interval timing and midfrontal delta oscillations are impaired in Parkinson’s disease patients with freezing of gait

Gait abnormalities and cognitive dysfunction are common in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and get worst with disease progression. Recent evidence has suggested a strong relationship between gait abnormalities and cognitive dysfunction in PD patients and impaired cognitive control could be one of the causes for abnormal gait patterns. However, the pathophysiological mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction in PD patients with gait problems are unclear. Here, we collected scalp electroencephalography (EEG) signals during a 7-second interval timing task to investigate the cortical mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction in PD patients with (PDFOG+, n=34) and without (PDFOG–, n=37) freezing of gait, as well as control subjects (n=37). Results showed that the PDFOG+ group exhibited the lowest maximum response density at around 7 seconds compared to PDFOG– and control groups, and this response density peak correlated with gait abnormalities as measured by FOG scores. EEG data demonstrated that PDFOG+ had decreased midfrontal delta-band power at the onset of the target cue, which was also correlated with maximum response density and FOG scores. In addition, our classifier performed better at discriminating PDFOG+ from PDFOG– and controls with an area under the curve of 0.93 when midfrontal delta power was chosen as a feature. These findings suggest that abnormal midfrontal activity in PDFOG+ is related to cognitive dysfunction and describe the mechanistic relationship between cognitive and gait functions in PDFOG+. Overall, these results could advance the development of novel biosignatures and brain stimulation approaches for PDFOG+.