Perseverometry: a novel performance marker in dementia

阿尔茨海默病患者S经常被他们的亲戚或照顾者注意到在谈话中重复自己。在早期阶段，这种行为可能只会被认为是轻微的恼怒，但这种倾向的恶化往往会促使人们寻求医学意见，并最终导致AD的诊断。随着疾病的恶化，重复变得更加频繁，所以如果有一种方法来测量它们的发生，这可以被用作诊断辅助和监测病情的工具。疾病监测对于评估治疗阿尔茨海默氏症的新药尤其关键。对患者与家人的对话进行录音将是一种侵入性的行为，而分析任何这样的录音记录以寻找重复的内容将是一个非常费力的过程。我们在这里提出的解决方案是连续记录发声器官的能量波动。这种信息不会被解释为语言(从而保护隐私)，但可以被迅速和自动地处理，以揭示代表以前重复的陈述或短语的片段(解决了解释的实际问题)。本研究的目的是确定获取和分析数据的最佳方法，并建立这种记录方法在AD患者日常生活中的可行性。

Patients with Alzheimer s disease are frequently noted by their relatives or carers to repeat themselves in conversation. In the early stages such behaviour might be regarded with no more than mild annoyance, but worsening of the tendency often motivates seeking a medical opinion, and leads eventually to the diagnosis of AD. With worsening of the disease, repetitions become more frequent, so if there were a means of measuring their occurence, this could be used as a diagnostic aid and a tool for monitoring the condition. Disease monitoring in particular is critical to the evaluation of novel drug treatments for Alzheimer s. Recording of patients conversations with their family members would be intrusive, and analysis of any such tape recorded record to look for repetitions would be a very laborious process. The solution we propose here is to make a continuous recording of energy fluctuations from the vocal apparatus. Such information would not be interpretable as language (thus safeguarding privacy) but could be rapidly and automatically processed to reveal segments that represented a previously repeated statement or phrase (solving the practical problems of interpretation). The aim of the present study is to determine the best methods for acquiring and analysing the data, and to establish the feasibility of such a recording method from AD patients as they go about their day to day lives.