Acoustic features are independently associated with heart failure and pulmonary hypertension

Acoustic analysis of speech has discriminated decompensated acute heart failure (HF). Speech rate (SR) and cepstral peak prominence (CPP) variation are among features previously evaluated. However, the association between SR and CPP and chronic stable HF with and without pulmonary hypertension (PH) as well as PH alone have not been previously studied.

Patients evaluated for HF and/or PH in the outpatient setting recorded a standardized text read out loud from which a sentence was extracted and analysed to extract pre-specified acoustic features including SR and CPP calculated for voiced speech (CPP-V) and in all speech (CPP-All). Patients were grouped depending on the presence or absence of disease (HF and/or PH) and symptoms. Linear regression models were fitted to determine the association between each acoustic feature and disease status.

In total, 2153 patients were included: age 65.32 ± 17.18 years; male n = 1246 (57.9%); 879 had HF (40.8%), 542 had PH (25.2%) and 777 had no disease and no symptoms (36.1%). After adjustment for age and sex, SR was significantly lower in patients with PH only [estimated coefficient, 95% confidence interval (CI): -0.14, -0.21 to -0.06, P = 0.0006], HF only (-0.11, -0.17 to -0.05, P = 0.0002) and HF with PH (-0.17, -0.24 to -0.10, P < 0.0001) compared with no disease. CPP-V differed in patients with PH only (0.37, 0.16-0.57, P = 0.0004) and CPP-All differed significantly compared with patients without disease (0.23, 0.08-0.38, P = 0.0025).

SR is significantly slower in patients with HF alone, PH alone and HF and PH combined compared with patients without disease. CPP also differs significantly in patients with PH compared with controls. These findings suggest that acoustic analysis may be useful in discriminating chronic stable HF and PH, offering promise for the development of non-invasive screening methods for HF and PH.