Speech disorders in Alzheimer’s disease: Preclinical markers of dementia?

Resumo

As has been shown in research, speech and language impairments are one of the key clinicalmanifestations of early-stage Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Currently, speech and language disorders areconsidered as important as other cognitive disruptions (memory loss, executive disfunction, learningproblems or vision impairments) for early detection of AD and its discrimination from other age-relatedpathologies, like amnesic Mild Cognitive Impairment, depressive and mood disorders. Traditionally, ADlanguage symptoms have been linked to difficulties in accessing lexicon and semantic networks. Morerecent studies, however, have emphasized that speech level impairs formerly in AD and therefore mayhave greater value in early diagnosis of this neurodegeneration. The aim of this work is to offer anoverview of speech variables, which undergo significant changes under neurodegenerative processes ofAD, and to attest how their assessment may allow detecting AD onset at preclinical stages of dementia.To that end, we draw upon the results from our speech analysis experiments with healthy elderly, personswith aMCI and AD sufferers, and discuss the potential predictivity of different temporal, acoustic andprosodic variables of vocal emission.