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Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia

Background and Objectives: Recent studies highlight the importance of investigating biomarkers for diagnosing and classifying patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Even though there is ongoing research on pathophysiological indices in this field, the use of behavioral variables, and espec...

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Autores principales: Potagas, Constantin, Nikitopoulou, Zoi, Angelopoulou, Georgia, Kasselimis, Dimitrios, Laskaris, Nikolaos, Kourtidou, Evie, Constantinides, Vasilios C., Bougea, Anastasia, Paraskevas, George P., Papageorgiou, Georgios, Tsolakopoulos, Dimitrios, Papageorgiou, Sokratis G., Kapaki, Elisabeth
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9611099/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36295513
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/medicina58101352
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author Potagas, Constantin
Nikitopoulou, Zoi
Angelopoulou, Georgia
Kasselimis, Dimitrios
Laskaris, Nikolaos
Kourtidou, Evie
Constantinides, Vasilios C.
Bougea, Anastasia
Paraskevas, George P.
Papageorgiou, Georgios
Tsolakopoulos, Dimitrios
Papageorgiou, Sokratis G.
Kapaki, Elisabeth
author_facet Potagas, Constantin
Nikitopoulou, Zoi
Angelopoulou, Georgia
Kasselimis, Dimitrios
Laskaris, Nikolaos
Kourtidou, Evie
Constantinides, Vasilios C.
Bougea, Anastasia
Paraskevas, George P.
Papageorgiou, Georgios
Tsolakopoulos, Dimitrios
Papageorgiou, Sokratis G.
Kapaki, Elisabeth
author_sort Potagas, Constantin
collection PubMed
description Background and Objectives: Recent studies highlight the importance of investigating biomarkers for diagnosing and classifying patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Even though there is ongoing research on pathophysiological indices in this field, the use of behavioral variables, and especially speech-derived factors, has drawn little attention in the relevant literature. The present study aims to investigate the possible utility of speech-derived indices, particularly silent pauses, as biomarkers for primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Materials and Methods: We recruited 22 PPA patients and 17 healthy controls, from whom we obtained speech samples based on two elicitation tasks, i.e., cookie theft picture description (CTP) and the patients’ personal narration of the disease onset and course. Results: Four main indices were derived from these speech samples: speech rate, articulation rate, pause frequency, and pause duration. In order to investigate whether these indices could be used to discriminate between the four groups of participants (healthy individuals and the three patient subgroups corresponding to the three variants of PPA), we conducted three sets of analyses: a series of ANOVAs, two principal component analyses (PCAs), and two hierarchical cluster analyses (HCAs). The ANOVAs revealed significant differences between the four subgroups for all four variables, with the CTP results being more robust. The subsequent PCAs and HCAs were in accordance with the initial statistical comparisons, revealing that the speech-derived indices for CTP provided a clearer classification and were especially useful for distinguishing the non-fluent variant from healthy participants as well as from the two other PPA taxonomic categories. Conclusions: In sum, we argue that speech-derived indices, and especially silent pauses, could be used as complementary biomarkers to efficiently discriminate between PPA and healthy speakers, as well as between the three variants of the disease.
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spelling pubmed-96110992022-10-28 Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia Potagas, Constantin Nikitopoulou, Zoi Angelopoulou, Georgia Kasselimis, Dimitrios Laskaris, Nikolaos Kourtidou, Evie Constantinides, Vasilios C. Bougea, Anastasia Paraskevas, George P. Papageorgiou, Georgios Tsolakopoulos, Dimitrios Papageorgiou, Sokratis G. Kapaki, Elisabeth Medicina (Kaunas) Article Background and Objectives: Recent studies highlight the importance of investigating biomarkers for diagnosing and classifying patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Even though there is ongoing research on pathophysiological indices in this field, the use of behavioral variables, and especially speech-derived factors, has drawn little attention in the relevant literature. The present study aims to investigate the possible utility of speech-derived indices, particularly silent pauses, as biomarkers for primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Materials and Methods: We recruited 22 PPA patients and 17 healthy controls, from whom we obtained speech samples based on two elicitation tasks, i.e., cookie theft picture description (CTP) and the patients’ personal narration of the disease onset and course. Results: Four main indices were derived from these speech samples: speech rate, articulation rate, pause frequency, and pause duration. In order to investigate whether these indices could be used to discriminate between the four groups of participants (healthy individuals and the three patient subgroups corresponding to the three variants of PPA), we conducted three sets of analyses: a series of ANOVAs, two principal component analyses (PCAs), and two hierarchical cluster analyses (HCAs). The ANOVAs revealed significant differences between the four subgroups for all four variables, with the CTP results being more robust. The subsequent PCAs and HCAs were in accordance with the initial statistical comparisons, revealing that the speech-derived indices for CTP provided a clearer classification and were especially useful for distinguishing the non-fluent variant from healthy participants as well as from the two other PPA taxonomic categories. Conclusions: In sum, we argue that speech-derived indices, and especially silent pauses, could be used as complementary biomarkers to efficiently discriminate between PPA and healthy speakers, as well as between the three variants of the disease. MDPI 2022-09-27 /pmc/articles/PMC9611099/ /pubmed/36295513 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/medicina58101352 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Potagas, Constantin
Nikitopoulou, Zoi
Angelopoulou, Georgia
Kasselimis, Dimitrios
Laskaris, Nikolaos
Kourtidou, Evie
Constantinides, Vasilios C.
Bougea, Anastasia
Paraskevas, George P.
Papageorgiou, Georgios
Tsolakopoulos, Dimitrios
Papageorgiou, Sokratis G.
Kapaki, Elisabeth
Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia
title Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia
title_full Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia
title_fullStr Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia
title_full_unstemmed Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia
title_short Silent Pauses and Speech Indices as Biomarkers for Primary Progressive Aphasia
title_sort silent pauses and speech indices as biomarkers for primary progressive aphasia
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9611099/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36295513
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/medicina58101352
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