The Perceive, Recall, Plan & Perform System of Task Analyses (PRPP) in Patients with Parkinson's Disease

Background: To compensate for the physical and cognitive deficits that affect occupational performance, people with Parkinson’s disease use both internal and external information processing strategies. (Vandenbossche et al,... [ view full abstract ]

Background:
To compensate for the physical and cognitive deficits that affect occupational performance, people with Parkinson’s disease use both internal and external information processing strategies. (Vandenbossche et al, 2012) The Perceive, Recall, Plan & Perform (PRPP) system (Chapparo & Ranka, 2006) was used to investigate the information processing strategy use of people with Parkinsons’s disease who had reduced performance of highly relevant occupations within their own home.
Method:
Multifaceted Rasch analysis on baseline information processing scores from 190 patients in Hoehn & Yahr stages 1-4 (part of the Occupational Therapy In Parkinson’s disease efficacy study) (Sturkenboom et al, 2014) to generate a hierarchy of test items and to propose a linear continuum, along which the difficulty of test items, raters, patients and tasks. The generated hierarchy was examined for congruency with constructs of information processing and stages of Parkinson’s symptomatology.
Results:
Items measuring attention, sensory processing, recall, planning, and performance monitoring align with information processing constructs, showing hierarchical difficulty in information processing strategy use that fit’s Parkinson’s disease disability symptoms.
Conclusion:
The PRPP is a valid tool to assess information processing strategy use in Parkinson’s disease during occupational performance and is sensitive to the degenerative character of this disease.
Application to Practice:
The PRPP is a useful system to assess and to evaluate cognitive strategy use during occupational performance in patients with Parkinson’s disease. The hierarchical information processing profile of patients with Parkinson’s disease is helpful in developing specific and systematic instruction interventions to enhance occupational performance in these patients.