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DETECTION OF BULBAR ALS USING A COMPREHENSIVE SPEECH ASSESSMENT BATTERY

The study aimed to develop a predictive method that would aid the diagnosis of the bulbar form of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) as early as possible, specifically before the onset of obvious clinical signs (e.g., changes in speech intelligibility and speaking rate). Multiple instrumental physiological measures collected across speech subsystems collected longitudinally from over one hundred patients diagnosed with ALS were subjected to multiple analyses. Variable screening was performed using group comparisons with kernel density estimators and with linear regression. Variables identified as showing sensitivity to bulbar ALS onset and progression were used in a linear classifier, which was able to identify individuals who will develop bulbar form of ALS with 80% accuracy. Although preliminary in nature, these results show that instrumental measures might be able to assist in the clinically important early diagnosis of bulbar ALS.