Diagnose Parkinson's disease in Two Minutes
Every year in the United States, there are 50,000 newly diagnosed Parkinson's disease. It is a neurological disorder. When nerve cells in brain stop generating dopamine, the Parkinson's disease will occur as the dopamine helps control muscle movement. Without dopamine, the nerve cells cannot properly send messages, leading to the loss of muscle function.
When proceeds to advanced stage, Parkinson's is easy to diagnose with the obvious symptoms. While in early stage, some symptoms such as tremors, slow movement or rigid muscles, the doctor has no sure answer but only can give some medicines for patients. If the symptoms improved, the doctor would suppose the patient has Parkinson's. Frankly, there are no effective or accurate methods to diagnose Parkinson's disease or cure for Parkinson's disease. Thus early detection is quite important since the treatments currently are available for controlling symptoms.
Rahul Shrivastav and his colleagues from the University of Florida's Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, have developed a new method to diagnose and track the progression of Parkinson's. Their findings were presented on the Acoustical Society of America Conference. They describe the new method is noninvasive and inexpensive, and, in early testing, has proved to be effective more than 90 percent of the time. In their test, the new method seems to be promising; in addition to above items, the new method also can measure the effectiveness of treatment for Parkinson's.
The new method involves monitoring a patient's speech patterns, specifically in movement patterns of the tongue and jaw as the Parkinson's disease will limit the movement speed and range. The researchers believe in this pattern in speech, the tongue doesn't move as far as and as quickly as it should and produces subtle changes in speech patterns.
Shrivastav said the new method is sensitive and effective to Parkinson's speech with only two seconds of speech is enough.
Tags: Parkinson’s disease, A New Method, Diagnose Quickly