RESEARCH ARTICLE
Subjective Self-Rated Speech Intelligibility and Quality of Life in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease in a Malaysian Sample
Shin Ying Chu1, *, Chai Li Tan2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2018Volume: 11
First Page: 485
Last Page: 493
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-11-485
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501811010485
Article History:
Received Date: 6/8/2018Revision Received Date: 7/11/2018
Acceptance Date: 9/11/2018
Electronic publication date: 26/11/2018
Collection year: 2018
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objectives:
This study compared the Quality of Life (QOL) of individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) with a healthy control from a sample in Malaysia. The relationship between the QOL, age, gender, duration of disease, self-rated speech scale, and life satisfaction level was examined.
Methods:
Fifty-four individuals with PD and 55 non-PD control adults completed the Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire-39 (PDQ-39) and rated their speech intelligibility [Self-Rated Speech Scale (SRSS)] and life satisfaction level [Life Satisfaction Scale (LSS)] on a 10-point scale.
Results:
PD participants reported significantly lower QOL scores than the control group (Mann-Whitney U). Although there was no significant relationship between the QOL, age, gender, and duration of disease for PD participants, moderately significant correlations were observed between QOL, LSS and SRSS ratings (Spearman correlation). Individuals with PD showed lower QOL and higher concern in their communication than the control group.
Conclusion:
Identifying patients’ perception of their speech performance could help clinicians to better understand patients’ needs when delivering speech therapy services.