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. 2011 Oct;119(1):30-41.
doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2011.05.006.

The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder

Sharon Ash  1 , Corey McMillan, Rachel G Gross, Philip Cook, Brianna Morgan, Ashley Boller, Michael Dreyfuss, Andrew Siderowf, Murray Grossman
Affiliations

The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder

Sharon Ash et al. Brain Lang. 2011 Oct.

Abstract

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic patients with LBSD, and we related their narrative impairments to gray matter (GM) atrophy using voxel-based morphometry. We found that patients with PDD and DLB have significant difficulty organizing their narrative speech. This was correlated with deficits on measures of executive functioning and speech fluency. Regression analyses associated this deficit with reduced cortical volume in inferior frontal and anterior cingulate regions. These findings are consistent with a model of narrative discourse that includes executive as well as language components and with an impairment of the organizational component of narrative discourse in patients with PDD and DLB.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Cortical atrophy in Lewy body spectrum disorder patients1
Note 1. Significant gray matter atrophy is shown in red. The vertical lines show the locations of the coronal slices displayed in Figure 2. In Panel A, the vertical slice is at y=38. In Panel B, the vertical slice is at y=48.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Regression analysis relating Local Connectedness to gray matter atrophy in brain regions that have significant gray matter atrophy. 1 Note 1. Significant gray matter atrophy is shown in red. Areas of correlation with local connectedness are shown in blue. Increasing impairment in local connectedness is related to cortical thinning. Panel A: y-axis = 38; Panel B: y-axis = 48. Coordinates of the atrophy peaks are given in Table 7.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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