Donepezil enhances understanding of degraded speech in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Auditory dysfunction under complex, dynamic listening conditions is a clinical hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD) but challenging to measure and manage. Here, we assessed understanding of sinewave speech (a paradigm of degraded speech perception) and general cognitive abilities in 17 AD patients, before and following a 10 mg dose of donepezil. Relative to healthy older individuals, patients had impaired sinewave speech comprehension that was selectively ameliorated by donepezil. Our findings demonstrate impaired perception of degraded speech in AD but retained perceptual learning capacity that can be harnessed by acetylcholinesterase inhibition, with implications for designing communication interventions and acoustic environments in dementia.

Retained capacity for perceptual learning of degraded speech in primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease

“…Functional neuroimaging paradigms based on degraded speech stimuli have been developed in the healthy brain [ 13 , 50 ], but they have yet to be applied to patients with dementia. The present findings corroborate our previous psychoacoustic work in tAD [ 15 ] and the recent demonstration that patients with nfvPPA benefit from retraining strategies for speech production and fluency, with lasting and generalisable improvement of communication function [ 51 ]. Our findings raise the further intriguing possibility that the efficacy of such communication interventions may be enhanced by engaging perceptual learning capacity (i.e., residual cerebral plasticity).…”

“…Syndromic groups were stratified by their overall accuracy in decoding sine-wave speech, with patients with nfvPPA and lvPPA exhibiting the most severe and consistent impairments. The findings in tAD extend previous evidence in this disease [ 15 ]. Syndromic profiles were modulated by the prior predictability of verbal content: The svPPA and tAD groups showed a significant advantage for perceiving sine-wave speech with highly predictable content (numbers) compared with less predictable content (place names), whereas within the geographical condition, all groups showed a performance advantage for more familiar (‘near’) over less familiar (‘far’) place names, and this advantage was exaggerated in patient groups compared with the healthy control participants.…”

The Early Intervention of Geniposide and PNS Combination Modulated Aβ Production and Synaptic Plasticity in Young APP/PS1 Transgenic Mice

“…In this study, we also used Aricept as a positive control group, since it is the rst drug approved by FDA to treat AD in clinic. Aricept (also called donepezil), as a cholinesterase inhibitor, leads to a temporary slowdown in the loss of cognitive function by decreasing cholinesterase activity, resulting in higher acetylcholine (Ach) levels and improved brain function with mild-to-moderate AD patients [27,28]. However, we did not observe evident effects of Aricept on APP/PS1 Tg mice at four-month age.…”

Subjective time perception in dementia: a behavioural and neuroanatomical analysis

“… 9 , 10 , 19 , 145 , 146 In addition to novel diagnostic tests, time perception could present a novel target for management strategies based on behavioural interventions 140 , 147 or pharmacotherapies exploiting retained dynamic neural plasticity. 148 …”