Motor speech and non-motor language endophenotypes of Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Introduction: Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease (PD) results in a range of motor and non-motor impairments. Clinical diagnosis commonly occurs after substantial neurophysiological damage limiting the opportunity for neuroprotective treatments. Uncovering sensitive objective markers with the capacity to detect pre-symptomatic disease and track disease progression is therefore a priority. Speech may provide an ideal proxy marker for PD; a quantifiable biometric that displays salient changes in early disease and appears to evolve with disease progression. Areas covered: This review describes the endophenotype of speech, voice, cognition and language modalities in PD and investigates the speech as ..