Media Release

For Immediate Release

April 5, 2005

Saint Mary's Professor Describes Dialects of Dementia to Help Diagnose Alzheimer's Disease

Is it possible that the health of our brains could be evident in the way we talk?

The question is at the centre of research being done by Dr. Elissa Asp, a professor of English and Linguistics at Saint Mary's University.

Assisted by a number of students, Dr. Asp is part of an interdisciplinary research team led by Dr. Kenneth Rockwood at Dalhousie University that is developing protocols for measuring the effectiveness of drugs used to treat Alzheimer's disease. Her role involves analyzing patient speech patterns, which she believes can help to differentiate types of dementias and to monitor treatment response.

Within a linguistic community, most members will use similar speech patterns to express themselves. When individuals develop Alzheimer's or vascular dementia, their speech patterns change in characteristic ways. Dr. Asp describes these dementia-induced language changes as, "dialects of dementia."

She says these speech changes involve more than simply forgetting words, or losing the ability to make particular sounds. The way people structure their sentences and their conversation actually changes. Moreover, her research is attempting to link specific changes in language to specific damage in the brain.

How are changed language patterns and degenerative brain disease related?

Dementias change structure and function in the brain. While not all parts of the brain contribute to language per se, change in particular brain areas will shape what information we have at hand to construct discourse. Dr. Asp says, for example, if our hippocampus, which is one part of our brain responsible for episodic memory, becomes diseased, our ability to reference particular events may be impaired, and our speech patterns will reflect this impairment. Put in reverse, speech patterns that do not include reference to episodic events may be an indication of damage to the hippocampus.

Description of the "dialects of dementia" is in early stages, but Dr. Asp's research may have long term important medical and social benefits. One benefit is the potential creation of improved, low-cost strategies to assist in the early diagnosis of dementias and in the assessment of treatment effectiveness. Physicians will be able to explicitly recognize speech patterns they already tacitly know which differentiate Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, and other illnesses such as depression.

As a result of Dr. Asp's work, patients and their families may get earlier diagnosis of dementia, and thus have more time to prepare for the changes such an illness will bring. As well, her work in measuring treatment effectiveness may help to maintain patients' independence, which will have great personal and social benefits in our aging population.

Students working and studying with Dr. Asp have had the opportunity both to learn and practice linguistic research skills, and to experience professional applications of linguistic study.

Over the past year, five Arts students have helped her transcribe and analyze doctor- patient interviews and code various language patterns.

More generally, students enrolled in Dr. Asp's courses on English language and discourse analysis learn about her Alzheimer's research and thus experience connections between language, discourse and neuroscience. In so doing, Dr. Ask takes her students on a unique interdisciplinary journey to some of the places where Arts and Sciences overlap.

Saint Mary's University is known for its community outreach projects, both in Canada and around the world. Saint Mary's, founded in 1802, is home to one of Canada's leading business schools, a Science Faculty widely known for its cutting-edge research, a comprehensive and innovative Arts Faculty and a new Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research.

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For More Information:

Paul Fitzgerald
Public Affairs Officer
Saint Mary's University, Public Affairs
(902) 420.5514
E-mail: paul.fitzgerald@smu.ca
www.smu.ca