Altered performance in attention tasks in patients with seasonal allergic rhinitis: seasonal dependency and association with disease characteristics

Abstract

SAR represents a state that is crucially linked to impairments in information processing and changes in attentional control adjustments. These cognitive alterations are more likely to be influenced by mood and basal inflammatory processes than sleep impairments or subjective symptom severity.

Memory and multitasking performance during acute allergic inflammation in seasonal allergic rhinitis

“…This finding is in line with previous studies reporting slower reactions in patients with SAR [11,15]. Their capacity to manage the processing of two tasks simultaneously is comparable in its nature to healthy participants.…”

“…In addition, patients showed a slowing of processing speed during on-season as indicated by longer reaction times independent of the task condition in both tasks. This finding is in line with previous studies reporting slower reactions in patients with SAR [11,15]. Importantly, this unspecific slowing might interfere with the measurement of other specific cognitive domains.…”

“…Likewise, children with SAR showed reduced learning performance in a computerbased simulation of a school lesson [12]. However, this effect might be influenced by an unspecific slowing of processing speed in patients, which has been described by our own group and others [11,15]. Impairments in driving abilities were comparable to effects seen with a blood alcohol level of 0.05%.…”

“…Wilken et al [14] showed that allergic provocation results in significant slower reaction times in a multitasking-related divided-attention task. However, this effect might be influenced by an unspecific slowing of processing speed in patients, which has been described by our own group and others [11,15]. Thus, it remains unclear whether SAR directly affects multitasking or whether SAR slows down cognitive functioning non-specifically.…”

“…We recently demonstrated that patients with SAR showed an altered performance in lowdemanding selective attention tasks (e.g. selecting task-relevant information while ignoring conflicting task-irrelevant information) [11]. Interestingly, performance in selective attention was not impaired per se.…”