부산대학교 도서관

Abstract Substantial variability and severity of dysarthric patterns across Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients may reflect distinct phenotypic differences. We aimed to compare patterns of speech disorder in early-onset PD (EOPD) and late-onset PD (LOPD) in drug-naive patients at early stages of disease. Speech samples were acquired from a total of 96 participants, including two subgroups of 24 de-novo PD patients and two subgroups of 24 age- and sex-matched young and old healthy controls. The EOPD group included patients with age at onset below 51 (mean 42.6, standard deviation 6.1) years and LOPD group patients with age at onset above 69 (mean 73.9, standard deviation 3.0) years. Quantitative acoustic vocal assessment of 10 unique speech dimensions related to respiration, phonation, articulation, prosody, and speech timing was performed. Despite similar perceptual dysarthria severity in both PD subgroups, EOPD showed weaker inspirations (p = 0.03), while LOPD was characterized by decreased voice quality (p = 0.02) and imprecise consonant articulation (p = 0.03). In addition, age-independent occurrence of monopitch (p