Abstract
Handedness has been shown to be associated with genetic variation involving brain development and neuropsychiatric diseases. Whether handedness plays a role in clinical phenotypes of common neurodegenerative diseases has not been extensively studied. This study used the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center database to examine whether self-reported handedness was associated with neuropsychological performance and neuropsychiatric symptoms in cognitively unimpaired individuals (n = 17 670), individuals with Alzheimer's disease (n = 10 709), behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (n = 1132) or dementia with Lewy bodies (n = 637). Of the sample, 8% were left-handed, and 2% were ambidextrous. There were small differences in the handedness distributions across the cognitively unimpaired, Alzheimer's disease, behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies groups (7.2-9.5% left-handed and 0.9-2.2% ambidextrous). After adjusting for age, gender and education, we found faster performance in Trail Making Test A in cognitively unimpaired non-right-handers (ambidextrous and left-handed) compared with right-handers. Excluding ambidextrous individuals, the left-handed cognitively unimpaired individuals had faster Trail Making Test A performance and better Number Span Forward performance than right-handers. Overall, handedness had no effects on most neuropsychological tests and none on neuropsychiatric symptoms. Handedness effect on Trail Making Test A in the cognitively unimpaired is likely to stem from test artefacts rather than a robust difference in cognitive performance. In conclusion, handedness does not appear to affect neuropsychological performance or neuropsychiatric symptoms in common neurodegenerative diseases.