What happens when a man loses his voice to Parkinson’s disease — and responds by making an album with some of Britain’s greatest musicians? For Ian Grant, Paul Mitchell, and John Caulcutt, the answer is Think Loud 4 Parkinson’s: a limited-edition vinyl and CD collection that brings together legends from The Stranglers, Fairport Convention, Big Country, the Sex Pistols, and more, all in service of finding a cure.
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What does it take to go from hiding a diagnosis in silence — popping pills in secret, withdrawing from the world — to becoming one of Ireland’s most visible advocates for Parkinson’s awareness? For Gary Bole, it started with a simple, persistent nudge from the person sitting beside him: “Speak up.”
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What happens when a rare neurological condition affects the clarity and confidence of someone’s speech — and the research on treatment is limited? That was the question behind a recent study exploring two intensive speech therapy approaches for people with Friedreich’s Ataxia.
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Imagine having a tool that tracks your client’s vocal intensity in real-time with calibrated accuracy, automatically calculates progress, stores all your data, and even provides visual feedback to keep your client engaged. That’s not wishful thinking, that’s LSVT Coach.
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Duffy (2013) defines speech intelligibility as the “degree of accuracy with which a listener recovers the acoustic signal or message produced by a speaker.” Kent (1992) considers intelligibility as the paramount issue in speech pathology, “the behavioral standard of communication.”
Speech intelligibility can be severely reduced in Parkinson’s disease (PD); it can be among the main concerns of people with PD (Miller et al., 2007). The validity and reliability in assessing speech intelligibility in PD may be affected by several factors.
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Research studies are fantastic. They give us the evidence we need to justify treatment choices, advocate for clients, and feel confident in what we’re doing. But let’s be real, reading a research article and actually implementing an approach with your own caseload are two very different things.
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We are thrilled to share the news that the manuscript “Harmonic Amplitude Differences Before and After Voice Treatment for Parkinson’s Disease and Their Relationship to Voice Quality and Speech Intelligibility” is now ‘in press’ in the Journal of Voice!
We asked one of the authors, Dr. Michael Cannito, to summarize the article by sharing his perspectives. Plus, all of the authors share their thoughts through a quote. The entire manuscript can be accessed by the here.
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When we think about speech treatment for children with cerebral palsy (CP), familiar challenges often come to mind: reduced loudness, imprecise articulation, monotone pitch and communication breakdowns that limit their real-world participation. Many of us have also felt the frustration of seeing progress in the therapy room that doesn’t always carry over to daily life.
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Twenty years ago, a paper in Seminars in Speech and Language described a new way to think about speech treatment in Parkinson’s disease: use principles of neuroplasticity to drive lasting change in voice and communication. That work grew out of clinical research in the late 1980s at the Lee Silverman Center for Parkinson’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Dr. Lorraine Ramig and speech-language pathologist Carolyn Mead Bonotati focused on a simple question: could intensive, targeted voice training help the brain reorganize itself to support better communication?
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