Dance and Huntington Disease

In this project investigators will evaluate the benefits of contemporary dance training using a comprehensive test battery combining standard neuropsychological batteries, psychological questionnaires on emotion, empathy and quality of life, structural magnet-resonance tomography (MRI), as well as psychophysical tests on movement recognition and agency, the sense of being in control of one's own movement.

For 10 years now two experienced dancer-choreographers lead dance workshops for people with Huntington's Disease (HD) and their family and caregivers in Paris. This project will evaluate objectively the effects these workshops have, by assessing a new group of 18 patients and their partners and caregivers before and after 8 month of weekly dance training.

People with HD are troubled by involuntary movements, of which they are however not accurately aware, but moreover they become impaired at recognising instrumental actions in others. It is well known that observing somebody else's action and executing the same action rest on a common neural network. This might mean that improving one's own action execution can improve the observation and understanding of others' actions in turn. Here, investigators will investigate both the impact the movement impairments caused by HD might have on patients themselves as well as on their partners and caregivers, as a consequence of the fact that own and other action representations are shared. After 8 months of contemporary dance training, both groups will be tested again, in order to establish if both action execution (self) and perception (in others) have improved.

Other recent psychophysics and brain imaging experiments have demonstrated how the sense of agency is composed from external cues (for example sound) of the consequences of movements, and from internal sensorimotor information that result from the action plan. Importantly, in HD the latter input might be impaired, but this has never been systematically tested. Making use of a psychophysics paradigm disentangling the two cues to agency investigators first monitor the sense of their own movement in HD, and further assess the changes in agency and in the role of these cues to agency after eight months of contemporary dance practice.

Finally investigators will monitor the structural brain changes accompanying this progress, comparing the brain before and after regular dance practice and correlating action recognition psychophysics measures of agency with these changes.

In sum, this project has a double impact. Firstly it will scientifically evaluate the impact of dance on the normal but especially the brain affected by a neurodegenerative disease that causes movement impairments, and establish its effect on behaviour and wellbeing. Secondly it will evaluate in patient partners and caregivers how they represent the patients' as well as their own movements and how this changes with dance practice.