Acoustic Analysis of PD Speech

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, approximately 500,000 Americans have Parkinson's disease (PD), with roughly another 50,000 receiving new diagnoses each year. 70%–90% of these people also have the hypokinetic dysarthria associated with PD. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) substantially relieves motor symptoms in advanced-stage patients for whom medication produces disabling dyskinesias. This study investigated speech changes as a result of DBS settings chosen to maximize motor performance. The speech of 10 PD patients and 12 normal controls was analyzed for syllable rate and variability, syllable length patterning, vowel fraction, voice-onset time variability, and spirantization. These were normalized by the controls' standard deviation to represent distance from normal and combined into a composite measure. Results show that DBS settings relieving motor symptoms can improve speech, making it up to three standard deviations closer to normal. However, the clinically motivated settings evaluated here show greater capacity to impair, rather than improve, speech. A feedback device developed from these findings could be useful to clinicians adjusting DBS parameters, as a means for ensuring they do not unwittingly choose DBS settings which impair patients' communication.