Department of Circuit Theory, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic.
Department of Neurology and Centre of Clinical Neuroscience, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University and General University Hospital, Prague, Czech Republic.
Mov Disord. 2022 Sep;37(9):1872-1882. doi: 10.1002/mds.29140. Epub 2022 Jul 7.
Patients with synucleinopathies frequently display language abnormalities. However, whether patients with isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) have prodromal language impairment remains unknown.
We examined whether the linguistic abnormalities in iRBD can serve as potential biomarkers for conversion to synucleinopathy, including the possible effect of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), speaking task, and automation of analysis procedure.
We enrolled 139 Czech native participants, including 40 iRBD without MCI and 14 iRBD with MCI, compared with 40 PD without MCI, 15 PD with MCI, and 30 healthy control subjects. Spontaneous discourse and story-tale narrative were transcribed and linguistically annotated. A quantitative analysis was performed computing three linguistic features. Human annotations were compared with fully automated annotations.
Compared with control subjects, patients with iRBD showed poorer content density, reflecting the reduction of content words and modifiers. Both PD and iRBD subgroups with MCI manifested less occurrence of unique words and a higher number of n-grams repetitions, indicating poorer lexical richness. The spontaneous discourse task demonstrated language impairment in iRBD without MCI with an area under the curve of 0.72, while the story-tale narrative task better reflected the presence of MCI, discriminating both PD and iRBD subgroups with MCI from control subjects with an area under the curve of up to 0.81. A strong correlation between manually and automatically computed results was achieved.
Linguistic features might provide a reliable automated method for detecting cognitive decline caused by prodromal neurodegeneration in subjects with iRBD, providing critical outcomes for future therapeutic trials. © 2022 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.
突触核蛋白病患者常出现语言异常。然而，孤立性快速眼动睡眠行为障碍（iRBD）患者是否存在前驱期语言障碍尚不清楚。
我们研究 iRBD 中的语言异常是否可以作为向突触核蛋白病转化的潜在生物标志物，包括轻度认知障碍（MCI）、说话任务和分析程序自动化的可能影响。
我们招募了 139 名捷克语母语参与者，包括 40 名无 MCI 的 iRBD 患者和 14 名有 MCI 的 iRBD 患者，与 40 名无 MCI 的 PD 患者、15 名有 MCI 的 PD 患者和 30 名健康对照组进行比较。对自发语篇和故事叙述进行转录和语言注释。进行了定量分析，计算了三个语言特征。将人工注释与完全自动化的注释进行了比较。
与对照组相比，iRBD 患者的内容密度较差，反映了内容词和修饰语的减少。有 MCI 的 PD 和 iRBD 亚组均表现出较少的独特词出现和更高的 n-gram 重复次数，表明词汇丰富度较差。自发语篇任务在无 MCI 的 iRBD 患者中显示出语言障碍，曲线下面积为 0.72，而故事叙述任务更好地反映了 MCI 的存在，区分了有 MCI 的 PD 和 iRBD 亚组与无 MCI 的健康对照组，曲线下面积高达 0.81。手动和自动计算结果之间存在很强的相关性。
语言特征可能为检测 iRBD 患者前驱性神经退行性变引起的认知下降提供一种可靠的自动化方法，为未来的治疗试验提供关键结果。
