Sensitivity of the Hinting Task in Patients With Huntington's Disease

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder, characterized by movement disorders, behavioural disorders and cognitive decline. Especially the behavioural and cognitive symptoms of the disease lead to significant disability and burden for patients as well as caregivers. One of the cognitive domains affected by HD is social cognition. Social cognition is the ability to perceive, interpret and respond correctly to social information. Aspects of social cognition are emotion recognition, perspective taking (Theory of Mind), and emapathy. Social cognition problems can be related to behavioural problems, but to be able to study this relationship, it is important to be able to reliable measure social cognition impairments. There are a few social cognition tests available, but often they are not normd and validated for use in a Dutch neurological population. There is a lack of sensitive, simple, tests for measuring Theory of Mind in patients with HD. A promising test, that already has been proven valid in a psychiatric population, is the Hinting Task. The Hinting Task measures theory of mind through indirect speech, The Hinting task is a social cognition test, where hints are implicitly given in speech, which resembles what patients and caregivers frequently report as difficult in HD. The Hinting Task has already been translated into Dutch and is already being used in clinical parctice, but its sensitivity has not been studied yet in a neurological population. The aim of this study is to assess if the Hinting Task is sensitive in patients with HD and to relate the Hinting Task to other (social) cognitive measures, demographical characteristics and disease characteristics.