Barcelona scale for buccophonatory apraxia: Quantitative assessment tool

Area of Science:

• Neurology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Objective quantification of buccophonatory apraxia is lacking for patient stratification and monitoring.
• Existing assessment methods do not provide objective measures for buccophonatory apraxia.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a quantitative scale for buccophonatory apraxia.
• To assess the scale's utility in patients with neurodegenerative diseases, particularly non-fluent/grammatical variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA).

Main Methods:

• A novel scale was designed and quantified in seconds.
• The scale was administered to 64 participants, including those with nfvPPA, semantic variant PPA (svPPA), logopenic PPA (lvPPA), Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, and healthy controls.

Main Results:

• Patients scored significantly higher than controls.
• The nfvPPA group exhibited the highest mean score (429 ± 278 seconds).
• The scale differentiated nfvPPA from svPPA and Parkinson's disease (AUC > 0.95), but less effectively from Huntington's disease and lvPPA.

Conclusions:

• The Barcelona scale for buccophonatory apraxia offers a quantitative method for evaluating this condition.
• The scale is particularly useful for comparing patients and monitoring disease progression, especially in nfvPPA.