• Share

PRINT

Your speech may, um, help reveal if you’re, uh…developing thinking problems. More pauses, filler words and other verbal changes might be an early sign of mental decline, which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, a study suggests.

Researchers had people describe a picture they were shown in taped sessions two years apart. Those with early-stage mild cognitive impairment slid much faster on certain verbal skills than those who didn’t develop thinking problems.

“What we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected earlier than we thought’’ — before or at the same time that memory problems emerge, said one study leader, Sterling Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This was the largest study ever done of speech analysis for this purpose, and if more testing confirms its value, it might offer a simple, cheap way to help screen people for very early signs of mental decline.

Different from normal aging

Don’t panic: Lots of people say “um’’ and have trouble quickly recalling names as they age, and that doesn’t mean trouble is on the way.

“In normal aging, it’s something that may come back to you later, and it’s not going to disrupt the whole conversation,’’ another study leader, Kimberly Mueller, explained.

“The difference here is, it is more frequent in a short period,’’ interferes with communication, and gets worse over time.   

About 47 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5.5 million people have the disease.

Current drugs can’t slow or reverse it, just ease symptoms. Doctors think treatment might need to start sooner to do any good, so there’s a push to find early signs.

Mild cognitive impairment causes changes that are noticeable to the person or others, but not enough to interfere with daily life. It doesn’t mean these folks will necessarily develop Alzheimer’s. But 15 to 20 percent of them do each year.

Hearing loss may be a factor

Another study at the conference, led by doctoral student Taylor Fields, hints that hearing loss may be another clue to possible mental decline.

It involved 783 people from the same Wisconsin registry project. Those who said at the start of the study that they had been diagnosed with hearing loss were more than twice as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment over the next five years as those who did not start out with a hearing problem.

That sort of information is not strong evidence, but it fits with earlier work along those lines.

Family doctors “can do a lot to help us if they knew what to look for’’ to catch early signs of decline, said Maria Carrillo, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science officer. Hearing loss, verbal changes and other known risks such as sleep problems might warrant a referral to a neurologist for a dementia check, she said.

An audio example of someone doing the test two years apart can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/user-186673023/alzheimers-speech-clues/s-btqgi.

— AP