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Facial muscle movements in patients with Parkinson's disease undergoing phonation tests
Fan Xu1, Xian-Wei Zou2, Li-Qiong Yang3
1Department of Public Health, Chengdu Medical College, Sichuan, China.
Purpose:
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a serious neurodegenerative disease affecting the elderly. In general, the locomotion deficit, which seriously affects the daily life of patients with PD, usually occurs at a later stage. The mask face symptom meanwhile progressively worsens. However, facial muscle disorders and changes involved in the freezing mask are unclear.
Method:
In this study, we recruited 35 patients with PD and 26 age- and sex-balanced controls to undergo phonation tests, while the built-in camera on the laptop recorded their facial expressions during the whole pronunciation process. Furthermore, FaceReader (version 7.0; Noldus Information Technology, Wageningen, Netherlands) was used to analyze changes in PD facial landmark movement and region movement.
Results:
The two-tailed Student's t-test showed that the changes in facial landmark movement among 49 landmarks were significantly lower in patients with PD than in the control group (P < 0.05). The data on facial region movement revealed that the eyes and upper lip of patients with PD differed significantly from those in the control group.
Conclusion:
Patients with PD had defects in facial landmark movement and regional movement when producing a single syllable, double syllable, and multiple syllables, which may be related to reduced facial expressions in patients with PD.
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