Atypical somatosensory-motor cortical response during vowel vocalization in spasmodic dysphonia.

ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE:Spasmodic dysphonia (SD) is a debilitating voice/speech disorder without an effective cure. To obtain a better understanding of the underlying cortical neural mechanism of the disease we analyzed electroencephalographic (EEG) signals of people with SD during voice production. METHOD:Ten SD individuals and 10 healthy volunteers produced 50 vowel vocalization epochs of 2500?ms duration. Two EEG features were derived: (1) event-related change in spectral power during vocalization relative to rest, (2) inter-regional spectral coherence. RESULTS:During early vocalization (500-1000?ms) the SD group showed significantly larger alpha band spectral power over the left motor cortex. During late vocalization (1000-2500?ms) SD patients showed a significantly larger gamma band coherence between left somatosensory and premotor cortical areas. CONCLUSIONS:Two atypical patterns of cortical activity characterize the pathophysiology of spasmodic dysphonia during voice production: (1) a reduced movement-related desynchronization of motor cortical networks, (2) an excessively large synchronization between left somatosensory and premotor cortical areas. SIGNIFICANCE:The pathophysiology of SD is characterized by an abnormally high synchronous activity within and across cortical neural networks involved in voice production that is mainly lateralized in the left hemisphere.

SUBMITTER: Khosravani S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7251941 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature