A comparative study on vowel articulation in Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy

International audience; Acoustic realisation of the working vowel space has been widely studied in Parkinson's disease (PD).

However, it has never been studied in atypical parkinsonian disorders (APD).

The latter are neurodegenerative diseases which share similar clinical features with PD, rendering the differential diagnosis very challenging in early disease stages.

This paper presents the first contribution in vowel space analysis in APD, by comparing corner vowel realisation in PD and the parkinsonian variant of Multiple System Atrophy (MSA-P).

Our study has the particularity of focusing exclusively on early stage PD and MSA-P patients, as our main purpose was early differential diagnosis between these two diseases.

We analysed the corner vowels, extracted from a spoken sentence, using traditional vowel space metrics.

We found no statistical difference between the PD group and healthy controls (HC) while MSA-P exhibited significant differences with the PD and HC groups.

We also found that some metrics conveyed complementary discriminative information.

Consequently, we argue that restriction in the acoustic realisation of corner vowels cannot be a viable early marker of PD, as hypothesised by some studies, but it might be a candidate as an early hypokinetic marker of MSA-P (when the clinical target is discrimination between PD and MSA-P).