Social cognition: The blind corner of neuropsychological assessment in Duchenne (neuro)muscular dystrophy - a scoping review.

Objective

systematically explore the available literature about unexplored neuropsychological domains in the characterization of the CNS involvement in DMD that could be relevant based on the recent findings about dystrophin expression in human CNS. Method: a scoping review was performed to comprehensively overview the neuropsychological scales/tests adopted on DMD patients. A systematic approach was applied to select pertinent papers among those published between 2000 and 2023. A labeling algorithm, based on Korkman and Luria's framework of neuropsychological sub-domains, was applied to classify the tools.

Results

The data extraction process resulted in a landscape of 96 adopted different tools. The Wechsler scales were the most recurring tests. The use of the other tools was more scattered, and most of them recurred only once. The least assessed function was social cognition (n = 18 references). Moreover, almost all adopted tests and scales referring to this domain were not specifically designed to assess social cognition.

Conclusions

dystrophin is highly expressed in structures involved in the brain networks underlying some social cognition skills. Our results, which provide evidence of a gap in the study of social cognition in DMD, underscore the importance of assessing this domain as a possible feature of the CNS phenotype of the disease, consistent with a few other previous reports.