title: The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder.
abstract: Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic patients with LBSD, and we related their narrative impairments to gray matter (GM) atrophy using voxel-based morphometry. We found that patients with PDD and DLB have significant difficulty organizing their narrative speech. This was correlated with deficits on measures of executive functioning and speech fluency. Regression analyses associated this deficit with reduced cortical volume in inferior frontal and anterior cingulate regions. These findings are consistent with a model of narrative discourse that includes executive as well as language components and with an impairment of the organizational component of narrative discourse in patients with PDD and DLB.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4283, USA. ash@babel.ling.upenn.edu
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ash
authors.forename: Corey
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McMillan
authors.forename: Rachel G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Gross
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cook
authors.forename: Brianna
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Morgan
authors.forename: Ashley
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Boller
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dreyfuss
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Siderowf
authors.forename: Murray
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Grossman
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001284:Atrophy / Q000150:complications / Q000473:pathology; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020961:Lewy Body Disease / Q000150:complications* / Q000473:pathology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D033262:Narration; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013060:Speech; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000209:etiology* / Q000473:pathology*