Impact of neurological disorders occurring in neurodegenerative diseases on the conversation process and patients' quality of life

Abstract

Introduction : Dialogue, or conversation, is the ability to speak as well as listen.  It plays a very important role in interpersonal relations.Speech disorders are a group of of disorders that includes various types of speech production difficulties. Speech production depends on the coordination of several motor acts: respiration, phonation, articulation, resonance and prosody. Phonation is the complex activity of producing sound by vibration of the vocal cords.  Resonance is the amplification of sounds at specific frequencies through vibration in the chest, throat and sinuses. Prosody includes a set of phonetic features, such as tone, loudness, tempo, and the overall timbre of speech, which are designed to intended to preserve the meaning and character of speech. Disruption of any of these related elements results in motor speech disorders.

Material and method : An overview is presented of language disorders in diseases neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease(PD) and Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA). Their impact on the conversation process and the patient's quality of life assessment was evaluated. The paper was based on scientific publications posted on the PubMed scientific platform.

Results : Speech and language disorders are the main symptoms of FRDA, which significantly affect the patients' quality of life. Patients often present with dysarthria, resulting from causes of central and peripheral and additional primary language disorders. The classic speech disorder in PD is hypokinetic dysarthria, manifested by hypophonia; monotonous, uneven and strained speech; reduced prosody (melodic voice); crowded articulation; inadequate pauses in speech; freezing of speech, unclear articulation.

Conclusions : The described disease entities show a significant impact on the deterioration of the process of of conversation by the patient, thus showing a significantly negative impact on the patients' quality of life.