Long-term dopaminergic therapy improves spoken language in de-novo Parkinson's disease.
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Background And Objectives The impact of dopaminergic medication on language in Parkinson's disease (PD) remains poorly understood. This observational, naturalistic study aimed to investigate the effects of long-term dopaminergic therapy on language performance in patients with de-novo PD based on a high-level linguistic analysis of natural spontaneous discourse.Methods A fairy-tale narration was recorded at baseline and a 12-month follow-up. The speech samples were automatically analyzed using six representative lexical and syntactic features based on automatic speech recognition and natural language processing.Results We enrolled 109 de-novo PD patients compared to 68 healthy controls. All subjects completed the 12-month follow-up; 92 PD patients were on stable dopaminergic medication (PD-treated), while 17 PD patients remained without medication (PD-untreated). At baseline, the PD-treated group exhibited abnormalities in syntactic domains, particularly in sentence length (p = 0.018) and sentence development (p = 0.042) compared to healthy controls. After 12 months of dopaminergic therapy, PD-treated showed improvements in the syntactic domain, including sentence length (p = 0.012) and sentence development (p = 0.030). Of all PD-treated patients, 37 were on monotherapy with dopamine agonists and manifested improvement in sentence length (p = 0.048), while 32 were on monotherapy with levodopa and had no language amelioration. No changes in language parameters over time were seen in both the PD-untreated group and healthy controls.Discussion Initiation of dopaminergic therapy improved high-language syntactic deficits in de-novo PD, confirming the role of dopamine in cognitive-linguistic processing. Automated linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech via natural language processing can assist in improving the prediction and management of language deficits in PD.
DOI: 10.48620/87920
Authors: Subert, Martin, Tykalova, Tereza, Novotny, Michal, Bezdicek, Ondrej, Dusek, Petr, Rusz, Jan
Language: English
Subfield: Neurology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6891994362
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