Emotional Prosody Treatment in Parkinson's
Parkinson Disease
About this trial
This is an interventional treatment trial for Parkinson Disease focused on measuring Prosody, Communication, Dysarthria
Eligibility Criteria
Inclusion Criteria:
- Experimental subjects must meet the Brain Bank criteria (Gibb & Lees, 1988) for idiopathic PD.
All participants must:
- be between the ages of 45 and 85
- have at least a sixth grade education
- fluent in English
The investigators will obtain information about participant's Parkinson's disease history from medical records including:
- age at onset
- current age
- gender
- handedness
- level of education
- side of the body initially affected
- information regarding subsequent clinical progression
- medications
- most recent Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) scores
- Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) (Hoehn & Yahr, 1967) scores
- The investigators will include subjects with H&Y Stages between 2 and 4
- Participants must be judged as having at least a mild level of affective prosodic deficit in pretreatment testing
Exclusion Criteria:
Individuals will be excluded with other forms of Parkinsonism such as:
- multiple systems atrophy
- Lewy body dementia
- progressive supranuclear palsy
Other exclusionary criteria will be:
- co-existing dementia (as indicated by score on Montreal Cognitive Assessment of below 26)
- neurological disease other than idiopathic PD
- major depression
- any other psychiatric illness
- chronic medical and neurological diseases other than PD (e.g., cardiac failure, renal disease, hepatic failure, stroke, or severe sensory deficits such as deafness or blindness (corrected visual acuity less than 20/50).
Sites / Locations
- North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System, Gainesville, FL
Arms of the Study
Arm 1
Experimental
Emotional prosodic treatment
The experimental treatment is consistent with the standard treatment in that it targets impairments in pitch/stress, loudness variability and control of speech rate, the core characteristics of prosodic insufficiency in PD (Darley, Aronson & Brown, 1969). However, the experimental treatment provides an innovative and targeted emphasis on the emotional component of the disorder. The production of emotional intonation in an utterance requires varying combinations of pitch/stress, loudness, and rate.