A Comparison of the Voice Differences of Patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease and a Normal-Aging Group

파킨슨병 환자와 정상 노인의 음성비교

In view of the hypothesis that the effects of Parkinson disease on voice production can be detected before pharmacological intervention, the voice differences of patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's disease and a healthy aging group were diagnostically analyzed with the long term object of establishing, for clinical purposes, early disease-progression biomarkers. Fifteen patients with Idopathic Parkinson's disease (prior to pharmacological intervention) and a healthy control group of 15 were selected and every voice was recorded three times using praat (ver. 5022) with a headset mic. Relevant parameters - acoustic measure of /a/ phonation, F0 related parameters, MPT related parameters, articulatory ratio, VOT - were then analyzed by MANOVA. Significant differences were found in the F0 related (low F0, high F0, F0 range) and MPT related parameters. There were also significant differences in acoustic measurements (intensity, shimmer, HNR, jitter), AMR (/$t{\Lambda}$/,/$k{\Lambda}$/) and VOT (/ta/), The findings indicated that the voice production of patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's disease have normal pitch but bad quality. In particular, with slow articulatory ratios and VOT values, the tongue tip functioning of patients was lower than for the healthy group.