Putaminal dopamine modulates movement motivation in Parkinson's disease

The relative inability to produce effortful movements is the most specific motor sign of Parkinson's disease, which is primarily characterized by loss of dopaminergic terminals in the putamen. The motor motivation hypothesis suggests that this motor deficit may not reflect a deficiency in motor control per se, but a deficiency in cost-benefit considerations for motor effort. For the first time, we investigated the quantitative effect of dopamine depletion on the motivation of motor effort in Parkinson's disease.A total of 21 early-stage, unmedicated patients with Parkinson's disease and 26 healthy controls were included. An incentivized force task was used to capture the amount of effort participants were willing to invest for different monetary incentive levels and dopamine transporter depletion in the bilateral putamen was assessed.Our results demonstrate that patients with Parkinson's disease applied significantly less grip force than healthy controls, especially for low incentive levels. Congruously, decrease of motor effort with greater loss of putaminal dopaminergic terminals was most pronounced for low incentive levels. This signifies that putaminal dopamine is most critical to motor effort when the trade-off with the benefit is poor.Taken together, we provide direct evidence that the reduction of effortful movements in Parkinson's disease depends on motivation and that this effect is associated with putaminal dopaminergic degeneration. Using an incentivized grip force task, Banwinkler et al. show that the reduction of effortful movements in Parkinson's disease is associated with putaminal dopaminergic degeneration. Dopamine depletion results in reduced motivation for motor effort, particularly in low reward conditions.