Impairments of speech fluency in Lewy body spectrum disorder

Abstract

Few studies have examined connected speech in demented and non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). We assessed the speech production of 35 patients with Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including non-demented PD patients, patients with PD dementia (PDD), and patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), in a semi-structured narrative speech sample in order to characterize impairments of speech fluency and to determine the factors contributing to reduced speech fluency in these patients. Both demented and non-demented PD patients exhibited reduced speech fluency, characterized by reduced overall speech rate and long pauses between sentences. Reduced speech rate in LBSD correlated with measures of between-utterance pauses, executive functioning, and grammatical comprehension. Regression analyses related non-fluent speech, grammatical difficulty, and executive difficulty to atrophy in frontal brain regions. These findings indicate that multiple factors contribute to slowed speech in LBSD, and this is mediated in part by disease in frontal brain regions.

Figure 1

Cortical atrophy in Lewy body spectrum disorder patients.¹ NOTE: 1. Vertical lines show locations of coronal slices displayed in Figure 2: y = 60 and y = 14.

Figure 2

Coronal slices showing overlap of correlations of measures of language production and neuropsychological test performance with cortical atrophy. Red shows region of correlation of WPM with cortical atrophy; colored outlines show regions of correlation of performance scores with cortical atrophy. Yellow = between-utterance pause time; blue = composite grammatical performance score; green = composite executive test Z-score.