Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) have to deal with several aspects of voice and speech decline and thus alteration of communication ability during the course of the disease. Among these communication impairments, 3 major challenges include: (1) dysarthria, consisting of orofacial motor dysfunction and dysprosody, which is linked to the neurodegenerative processes; (2) effects of the pharmacological treatment, which vary according to the disease stage; and (3) particular speech modifications that may be language-specific, that is, dependent on the language spoken by the patients. The main objective of the FraLusoPark project is to provide a thorough evaluation of changes in PD speech as a result of pharmacological treatment and disease duration in 2 different languages (French vs European Portuguese).
Methods and analysis Individuals with PD are enrolled in the study in France (N=60) and Portugal (N=60). Their global motor disability and orofacial motor functions is assessed with specific clinical rating scales, without (OFF) and with (ON) pharmacological treatment. 2 groups of 60 healthy age-matched volunteers provide the reference for between-group comparisons. Along with the clinical examinations, several speech tasks are recorded to obtain acoustic and perceptual measures. Patient-reported outcome measures are used to assess the psychosocial impact of dysarthria on quality of life.
Ethics and dissemination The study has been approved by the local responsible committees on human experimentation and is conducted in accordance with the ethical standards. A valuable large-scale database of speech recordings and metadata from patients with PD in France and Portugal will be constructed. Results will be disseminated in several articles in peer-reviewed journals and in conference presentations. Recommendations on how to assess speech and voice disorders in individuals with PD to monitor the progression and management of symptoms will be provided.
Trial registration number NCT02753192, Pre-results.
- Parkinson’s disease
- Dysarthria
- Speech
- Cross-language
- Disease progression
- Pharmacological treatment
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Footnotes
Contributors SP and JJF are the principal investigators of the FraLusoPark study. They designed the study and ensure the good performance of the study. JJF and FV are the neurologists in charge of patient recruitment and neurological assessments. RC, JS, HS, CM, JC, FV and SP perform data acquisition and other clinical examinations. RC, JS, PO and IG are in charge of the pre-processing and analyses of acoustic measurements. CA-C and AL are in charge of the analyses of the PROMs and clinical assessments. PW, PO, MD, MC, SF and MV are the linguistic experts in charge of the prosody evaluations. IPM is the neurobehaviour, language and cognition expert. SP wrote the draft of the present article. All coauthors commented and revised it critically for important intellectual content, and approved the final version to be published.
Funding This study is supported by a bilateral transnational funding between France and Portugal: support from the French government, through the French National Agency for Research (ANR—Agence Nationale de la Recherche—grant number ANR-13-ISH2-0001-01) and from the Portuguese government, through the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia—grant number FCT-ANR/NEU-SCC/0005/2013). CA-C wishes to thank his PhD grant scheme co-funders: PACA Regional Council and Orthomalin (http://www.orthomalin.com/).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Obtained.
Ethics approval France: Comité de Protection des Personnes, Sud Méditerranée 1, project reference number 13-84, approval date 09/01/2014; Portugal: Ethics Committee of the Lisbon Academic Medical Centre, project reference number 239-14, approval date 12/06/2014.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement We addressed this point in the “Ethics and dissemination” section of the article, as follows: Both in medical (eg, http://www.mrc.ac.uk/research/research-policy-ethics/data-sharing/data-sharing-population-and-patient-studies/) and linguistic (http://sldr.org/) domains, data sharing is important to maximise the lifetime value of human health data. It is our intention to contribute to this practice by archiving our data for long-term preservation and making them accessible after the completion of our analyses.
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