"The Brain Wiring Behind a Frustrating Speech Disorder"
New research on the intricate patterns of brain activity needed to produce speech is giving scientists fresh insights into what goes wrong in various speech disorders. Kristina Simonyan, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, uses functional MRI scans to study brain regions involved in the various movements that control speech. Her work aims to decipher how abnormalities in different brain areas give rise to spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that causes spasms of the vocal cords and disrupts people’s ability to speak normally. For a study published in the European Journal of Neurology in June, Dr. Simonyan performed brain scans on roughly 100 patients and healthy controls. She looked for patterns to use in developing a computer algorithm to differentiate between people with normal brains and those with spasmodic dysphonia. The program currently can identify people with the disorder with about 70% accuracy, she says. With further research she hopes to increase the accuracy, as well as study the genetic links of the disorder. Learn more.
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