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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