Speech biomarkers of risk factors for vascular dementia in people with mild cognitive impairment

Abstract

Introduction: In this study we intend to use speech analysis to analyze the cognitive impairments caused by pathologies of vascular origin such as diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and heart disease, predictors of the development of vascular dementia. Methods: In this study, 40 participants with mild cognitive impairment were asked to read while being recorded and they were inquired about their history of the aforementioned conditions. Their speech was then analyzed. Results: We found that some speech parameters of frequencies and syllabic rhythm vary due to these pathologies. In addition, we conducted a discriminant analysis in which we found that diabetes and hypertension can be predicted with an accuracy over 95% with few speech parameters, and hypercholesterolemia and heart disease with an accuracy over 80%. Discussion: The predictor parameters found are heterogeneous, including voice quality, amplitude, frequency, and rhythm parameters. This result may lead to investigate why such important qualitative changes occur in the voice of older adults with these pathologies. Rather than trying to find a diagnostic procedure already existing in classical medicine, we expect this finding to contribute to explore the causes and concomitant pathologies of these diseases. We discuss the implications of behavioral traits, such as speech, as digital biomarkers.