HDRUK Oxford Monthly Meetup, Monday 24 February 2025, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Speaker: Dr Chris Hinds, Robertson Foundation Fellow in Digital Phenotyping, NDPH
Title: How early are the signs of Alzheimer’s disease manifested within speech?
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Mode: Hybrid
In person venue: Richard Doll Building Lecture Theater
To attend online – please register (link below)

Abstract: Speech and language changes occur decades before the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Digital tools for frequent speech assessments offer promise for early-stage AD trials, yet uncertainties remain regarding remote speech collection feasibility and whether such changes begin early enough in the disease. We collected 2003 speech samples from 159 RADAR-AD study participants (47 healthy, 31 preclinical, 49 prodromal, and 32 mild-to-moderate AD) using the Mezurio smartphone application’s story narration task. CSF amyloid and phosphorylated tau were assessed. The utility of speech features was evaluated using linear mixed models and Machine Learning classifiers. High completion rates and good inter-correlation coefficients demonstrated feasibility. Speech features classified mild-to-moderate AD from healthy controls with an accuracy of 0.90 and significant fluency changes were observed from prodromal AD onwards. Changes to articulation rate may begin in tau positive preclinical participants before overt cognitive difference appear, but a larger biomarker-defined cohort would be needed for confirmation.