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Monday, October 30, 2017

BGSU professor researching Parkinson's influence on speech

October 30, 2017     By BONNIE BLANKINSHIP| SPECIAL TO THE BLADE

Jason Whitfield, an Ohio-licensed speech-language pathologist at the College of Health and Human Services at Bowling Green State University.


Parkinson’s disease is well known for producing tremors, muscle rigidity, and a halting gait. But it can also affect speech, making it difficult to produce sounds and communicate clearly.
That is the aspect of the disease studied by Jason Whitfield, an assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders at Bowling Green State University. He has presented and published widely on his research into how speech is impaired in Parkinson’s, with the goal of improving rehabilitative techniques for individuals who experience communication difficulties.
“I enjoy working with the population of people with Parkinson’s, and I attend local support groups,” Mr. Whitfield said. “While it can be a very challenging and difficult disease, the people tend to be very empowered and committed to beating or fighting it. I’m also interested in the basal ganglia region of the brain that’s affected in Parkinson’s and the role it plays in speech production.
“Parkinson’s disease varies widely among people, and, luckily, the effects on speech are usually fairly mild, but they can also be significant. It can produce what we call disfluency, a stuttering-like disturbance in their speech. They can have trouble with initiation, or starting the movement to produce speech. They also have difficulties with the later stages of motor learning. My lab focus is on the juncture of speech motor control and cognition.”
In BGSU’s Motor Speech Lab, Mr. Whitfield and his students study speech production and motor learning, which is what happens in the brain when practice or repetition of a movement enables the acquisition of a new motor skill. They also conduct acoustic analysis of normal and disordered speech, and have collaborated on this with Ronald Scherer, Distinguished Research Professor of communication sciences. Mr. Whitfield is developing and commercializing software for the acoustic measurement of speech.
He is in a new collaboration with Adam Fullenkamp, an assistant professor of exercise science, to examine lip and jaw movement using motion capture technology to see how speech movement and speech sound production are impaired in people with Parkinson’s.
This research resulted in Mr. Whitfield achieving the unusual distinction this year of having two manuscripts accepted on the same day to the most prestigious and selective journal in his field, the Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Research. Both articles had to do with ideas on how motor learning and speech-motor learning is affected in Parkinson’s and how people with the disease are able to learn and retain novel speech utterances.
This second part of his research involves working with Parkinson’s subjects to see if practicing, or rehearsing, speaking clearly will help maintain or improve their level of speaking ability.
“Parkinson’s is known primarily as a ‘disease of aging,’” Mr. Whitfield said. “The average age of onset is 60-65 years. So, in Parkinson’s we’re not looking at speech development but at speech rehabilitation, helping people to relearn or alter their current patterns. It’s more about habit formation and changing the habitual bad productions to good productions.”
To test this, he is experimenting with having patients perform dual tasks of doing something with their hand while saying a phrase, and measuring their ability to do both things at once. Then they practice saying the phrase and making the hand motion again until it becomes comfortable and almost automatic for them. Next, Mr. Whitfield and his team again test their ability to perform the two tasks simultaneously.
“We’re asking, ‘How robust is the motor learning system in these patients? How can we expect gains to be retained? How robust it is to interfering demands?”
He noted that testing speech production with patients in the lab where it’s quiet with no distractions is one thing, but when people are out in public, with other noises and activity around them, their ability tends to deteriorate quite a bit.
He and his students have published a paper on the effects of practice. “They do improve with rehearsal,” he said. “Everyone can get better with treatment, but no one can predict the progression of the disease.”
Since Parkinson’s is a degenerative disease, sometimes the goal is to prepare people for deficits that may come, he said, or in other cases to help regain their ability.
Mr. Whitfield is the 2017-18 recipient of the Clyde Willis Award, presented annually to a College of Health and Human Services faculty member whose accomplishments best represent “a strong, balanced performance in the traditional areas of teaching, scholarship and service during the past calendar year, with particular emphasis on major accomplishments in research.”
Four of his journal articles have been published in 2017. This past year he also had nine, peer-reviewed presentations at national conferences, one of which was selected for a meritorious poster award, and the majority of which he co-authored with students, including undergraduates.
Including students in his research is extremely important to him, he said, based on his own valuable experiences as a student. His lab team includes two PhD students, Anna Gravelin and Zoe Kriegel, and typically five to eight undergraduate researchers.
The cause of Parkinson’s is unknown, Mr. Whitfield said. There is early research looking for biomarkers in blood, which has not yielded firm results yet.
“But it’s much more systemic than we thought,” he said. “It begins much earlier than the motor systems arise. Parkinson’s research into the origins is now focusing on epigenetics, looking at both genetic factors and environmental triggers. There may be some small genetic predisposition that sets your baseline vulnerability, and then when you come into contact with toxic materials like pesticides, herbicides, or heavy metals, you get it.
“When I interview people with Parkinson’s, they often report growing up on a farm or next to a farm, being metal workers or having been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, or being around metal or dust. It’s hard to control.”

Dr. Jason Whitfield is an Ohio-licensed speech-language pathologist in the College of Health and Human Services at Bowling Green State University. For more information, visit BGSU.edu.

http://www.toledoblade.com/Medical/2017/10/30/BGSU-professor-researching-Parkinson-s-influence-on-speech.html

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