Impairment in mental skills could affect the conversational ability of people with Parkinson’s more than the physical speech problems, a new research has found.
The discovery, made by scientists at the University of East Anglia and the University of Aberdeen, promises to change the way therapists treat the condition.
“Around 70 per cent of people with Parkinson’s have problems with speech and communication, which can really impact their quality of life,” said lead author Maxwell Barnish.
“Researchers and clinicians have in the past focused on the physical problems patients have with making their speech clear.
“But patients themselves say the problems are more complex and are more to do with cognitive impairment – for example not being able to think quickly enough to keep up with conversations or not being able to find the right words.
“They say that this has the biggest impact on their ability to communicate in everyday life.
“We wanted to really prioritise the problems that patients experience – and to find out whether it is clarity of speech, or these more cognitive issues, that have the most impact on everyday communication.”
The research team undertook the first systematic review to look at whether cognitive issues or physical speech problems create the biggest barriers to communication. They sifted through nearly 5,000 studies in search of helpful data, and found 12 relevant studies involving 222 patients.
They found that both cognitive status and physical speech problems are associated with everyday communication problems among people with Parkinson’s. However patients who had greater cognitive difficulties, had more problems communicating.
And while patients with less clear speech also had trouble communicating, this factor had less of an impact on everyday communication.
Now the team, whose work is published in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, has called for a change in the way the condition is treated.
They said that most speech therapy focuses on motor control – rather than on working on new ways for patients to keep up with conversation.
Parkinson’s is a progressive neurological condition that destroys the brain cells producing the chemical messenger dopamine, in the part of the brain that controls movement.
Due to global ageing populations, Parkinson’s should be considered a major healthcare challenge of the future, and it will become increasingly important to prioritise the needs of patients in research, the researchers suggested.
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