Sample Parkinson’s Disease Battery

A large pharmaceutical team was running a Phase 2 trial in Parkinson’s disease to evaluate the safety and efficacy of their novel M1 PAM compound (TAK-071). The team selected Cogstate to provide a battery of digital cognitive tests to measure treatment impact on cognition.

• 54 participants took place in the trial with 6 weeks of treatment.
• A cognitive composite score was developed consisting of 7 performance-based tests covering 3 cognitive domains that are commonly affected early in PD-MCI and PDD: attention, executive function, and memory.
• Statistically significant improvements in the executive function and attention domain scores, as well as for both individual tests within the executive function domain, were observed for treatment compared with placebo.

Results from the cognitive battery showed that TAK-071 was well tolerated and improved the secondary efficacy outcome (cognitive composite score) vs placebo.

Shanbhag et al., JAMA Neurology (2025), doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2024.4519

A large pharmaceutical team was running a phase 2 trial of AQW051 in patients with Parkinson’s disease and levodopa-induced dyskinesia. Because Parkinson’s disease patients are known to be impacted by cognitive impairment, the study team included digital tests of cognition as secondary measures in their trial.

• 67 patients completed the study and took a battery of Cogstate digital cognitive assessments, including the One Back and International Shopping List tests.
• Exploratory repeated measures analysis from the digital tests showed that compared with placebo, AQW051 50 mg/day yielded a change corresponding to a standardized effect size of 0.5, and an effect size of 0.4 at 10mg/day. Individual memory tasks also improved moderately at both doses.

The study team noted several statistically significant differences in cognition between drug and placebo based on the data collected using Cogstate digital tests.

Trenkwalder et al., Movement Disorders (2016), DOI: 10.1002/mds.26569