Speech aging may differ across dementia phenotypes

Speech-derived age gaps aligned with cognition, tau pathology, social exposures, and independent measures of biological aging.

1

The study analyzed speech features from 2,928 Spanish-speaking participants, including healthy controls and various dementia phenotypes.
2

Speech age gaps (SAGs) were calculated, showing that healthy controls had lower gaps compared to dementia patients, particularly those with ldFTD and nldFTD.
3

Larger SAGs were linked to poorer performance in clinical and cognitive measures, with stronger associations observed in linguistic tasks.
4

SAGs correlated with neurodegeneration markers, including plasma p-Tau217, and showed positive associations with brain-age gaps.
5

The study's limitations included its cross-sectional design and the restriction to Latin American populations, affecting generalizability.