“Your
speech may, um, help reveal if you’re uh ... developing thinking problems. More
pauses, filler words and other verbal changes might be an early sign of mental
decline, which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, a study suggests.
“Researchers
had people describe a picture they were shown in taped sessions two years
apart. Those with early-stage mild cognitive impairment slid much faster on
certain verbal skills than those who didn’t develop thinking problems. ‘What
we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected
earlier than we thought,’ before or at the same time that memory problems
emerge, said one study leader, Sterling Johnson of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
“This
was the largest study ever done of speech analysis for this purpose, and if
more testing confirms its value, it might offer a simple, cheap way to help
screen people for very early signs of mental decline.
“Don’t
panic: Lots of people say ‘um’ and have trouble quickly recalling names as they
age, and that doesn’t mean trouble is on the way. ‘In normal aging, it’s
something that may come back to you later and it’s not going to disrupt the
whole conversation,’ another study leader, Kimberly Mueller, explained. ‘The
difference here is, it is more frequent in a short period,’ interferes with
communication and gets worse over time.
“The
study was discussed Monday [July 17] at the Alzheimer’s
Association International Conference in London. About 47 million people
worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s
is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5.5 million people have the
disease. Current drugs can’t slow or reverse it, just ease symptoms. Doctors
think treatment might need to start sooner to do any good, so there’s a push to
find early signs.
“Mild
cognitive impairment causes changes that are noticeable to the person or
others, but not enough to interfere with daily life. It doesn’t mean these folks
will develop Alzheimer’s, but many do — 15 to 20 percent per year.
“To
see if speech analysis can find early signs, researchers first did the
picture-description test on 400 people without cognitive problems and saw no
change over time in verbal skills. Next, they tested 264 participants in the
Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention, a long-running study of people
in their 50s and 60s, most of whom have a parent with Alzheimer’s and might be
at higher risk for the disease themselves. Of those, 64 already had signs of
early decline or developed it over the next two years, according to other
neurological tests they took.
“In
the second round of tests, they declined
faster on content (ideas they expressed) and fluency (the flow of speech and
how many pauses and filler words they used.) They used more pronouns such as ‘it’
or ‘they’ instead of specific names for things, spoke in shorter sentences and
took longer to convey what they had to say. ‘Those are all indicators of
struggling with that computational load that the brain has to conduct’ and
supports the role of this test to detect decline, said Julie Liss, a speech
expert at Arizona State University with no role in the work.
“She
helped lead a study in 2015 that analyzed dozens of press conferences by former
President Ronald Reagan and found evidence of speech changes more than a decade
before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She also co-founded a company that
analyzes speech for many neurological problems, including dementia, traumatic
brain injury and Parkinson’s disease.
“Researchers
could not estimate the cost of testing for a single patient, but for a doctor
to offer it requires only a digital tape recorder and a computer program or app
to analyze results...
“Another
study at the conference on Monday, led by doctoral student Taylor Fields, hints
that hearing loss may be another clue to possible mental decline. It involved
783 people from the same Wisconsin registry project. Those who said at the
start of the study that they had been diagnosed with hearing loss were more
than twice as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment over the next five
years as those who did not start out with a hearing problem. That sort of
information is not strong evidence, but it fits with earlier work along those
lines.
“Family
doctors ‘can do a lot to help us if they knew what to look for’ to catch early
signs of decline, said Maria Carrillo, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science
officer. Hearing loss, verbal changes and other known risks
such as sleep problems might warrant a referral to a neurologist for a dementia
check, she said.”
___ Audio
of example test: http://bit.ly/2sZklbU
from
Hearing is believing: Speech may be a clue to mental decline by Marilynn
Marchione
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