Word finding, prosody and social cognition in multiple sclerosis

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Clinical Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Multiple sclerosis (MS) is associated with reported impairments in speech and social cognition.
• The relationship between these cognitive deficits and overall neuropsychological outcomes in MS remains unclear.
• The clinical utility of assessing speech and social cognition as markers for MS progression or disability is not well-established.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate word finding abilities, prosody, and social cognition in people with MS (pwMS).
• To compare these functions in pwMS against healthy controls (HC).
• To explore the associations between speech and social cognition and neuropsychological outcomes in MS.

Main Methods:

• Recruited participants with relapsing MS (RMS), progressive MS (PMS), and HC.
• Administered a comprehensive battery of assessments including word-finding tasks, social cognition tests, neuropsychological evaluations, and clinical measures.
• Conducted speech tasks for detailed prosodic analysis.

Main Results:

• People with MS exhibited slower information processing speed and higher depression scores compared to HC.
• Word-finding measures, particularly visual object naming and rapid automatised naming, showed significant impairments in pwMS versus HC and in PMS versus RMS.
• Prosody and social cognition did not significantly differ between pwMS and HC, and were largely independent of mood.

Conclusions:

• Word finding deficits, especially in visual object perception, are prominent in MS and correlate with information processing speed.
• These word-finding impairments demonstrate larger effect sizes than general cognitive measures like the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT).
• Impaired visual object meaning perception may represent a unique MS-related deficit, potentially useful as an adjunct disability metric.