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Background: Pause duration analysis is a common feature in the study of discourse in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and may also be helpful for its early detection. However, studies involving patients at the preclinical stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have yielded varying results.Objectives: To characterize the probability density distribution of speech pause duration in AD, two multi-domain amnestic MCI patients (with memory encoding deficits, a-mdMCI-E, and only with retrieval impairment, a-mdMCI-R) and healthy control groups (HC) and to check if there are significant differences between them. To discuss the potential of those findings in clinical practice.Method: 112 picture-based oral narratives were manually transcribed and annotated for the automatic extraction of pause durations and their subsequent logconversion. We consider different probability distributions to fit speech pause duration truncating shorter ranges taking into account latest statistical findings to avoid inherent methodological uncertainties present in them.Results: Lognormal distribution (LND) explains the distribution of pause duration in speech for all groups, and its fitted parameters (µ,σ ) followed a gradation from the group with shorter durations and a higher tendency to produce short pauses (HC) to the group with longer pause durations and a considerably higher tendency to produce long pauses with more variance (AD). Importantly, a-mdMCI-E produced significantly longer pauses with greater variability than their a-mdMCI-R counterparts (α = 0.05) across all groups of study. Conclusion:We characterize and report significant differences at group level in the speech pause distribution across all groups of study that could be used to design tools and experiments for early prediction of AD progression.

Objectives To evaluate whether the prescription of monoamine oxidase B inhibitors (MAOB‐I), rasagiline and safinamide, contributes to the reduction of levodopa and/or dopamine agonists (DA) dose in order to minimize adverse effects. Materials and Methods A total of 724 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have been prospectively included in our database since the year 2000, representing a total of 5124 visits. For each patient and visit, antiparkinsonian treatment was recorded. In the presence of rasagiline and safinamide, we analysed the evolution of levodopa equivalent dose (LED) and LED for DA (LED‐DA). Results The data obtained from the 1664 visits between 2006 and 2010 (321 patients) and the 1709 visits between 2014 and 2018 (403 patients) were analysed in order to assess the impact of the introduction of rasagiline and safinamide, respectively. The annual mean LED remained stable without statistically significant differences. In the first period (impact of rasagiline), the annual mean LED‐DA in 2010 was significantly higher than in 2006 (P = 0.001). In the second period (impact of safinamide), the annual mean LED‐DA in 2018 was significantly lower than in 2014 (P = 0.002). A repeated‐measure analyses of LED‐DA including only patients who had taken safinamide showed a statistically significant decrease in LED‐DA (P = 0.027). Conclusions The introduction of MAOB‐I in the overall treatment of PD as part of routine clinical practice has not helped to reduce annual mean LED. However, safinamide reduces annual mean LED‐DA and may be linked to a reduction in dose‐dependent adverse effects in the long term.

This study analysed the capacity of the Catalan and Spanish versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) to distinguish between normal and pathological aging. Both versions of the test were administered to 45 bilingual subjects: 15 healthy aging subjects, 15 patients with mild cognitive impairment and 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease. To explore which combination of subtests was best suited to differentiate the three study groups, stepwise discriminant analyses were performed using each version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test separately and together. The percentages of properly classified subjects were as follows: 93.3% when the Spanish version was administered, 88.9% when the Catalan version was administered and 95.6% when both versions were used. The subtests that best classified the subjects were of the lexical-semantic type but also related to metalinguistic capacity and language organisation skills. The performance of each group in Catalan and Spanish was more similar than different.