An interventional study of voice recordings in Parkinson Disease and Multiple System Atrophy, sponsored by University Hospital, Bordeaux. Completed at 2 sites in France. Open to participants aged 30 Years to 80 Years, including healthy volunteers. Per ClinicalTrials.gov, last updated 2026-06-24.
Sponsored by University Hospital, Bordeaux · Not applicable, Interventional, and Diagnostic
Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease. Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a relentlessly progressing rare neurodegenerative disease of unknown etiology. The differential diagnosis between the MSA-Parkinsonism (MSA-P) subtype and PD can be very challenging in early disease stages, while early diagnostic certitude is important for the patient because of the diverging prognosis. At the time being, there exists no validated objective biomarker to guide the clinician. Dysarthria is a common early symptom in both diseases and of different origin. The ambition and the originality of this project are to develop a digital voice-based tool for objective discrimination between PD and MSA-P.
The team will build a corpus of voice samples of patients with both diseases and healthy volunteers. This corpus will consist of sustained vowels, pseudo-words, repetition of syllables, utterances of a standard text and spontaneous speech. Voice recordings will be performed using a high quality digital recorder (H4n) and the EVA-2 workstations. EVA-2 is a state-of-the-art system dedicated to pathological voice recording and analysis, which also allows the measurement of aerodynamic features such as intra-oral and subglottal pressure.
An electroglottograph (EGG), a non-invasive device, will also be used in conjunction with the recordings to provide the ground truth of glottal opening and closure instants (OGI and GCI) during utterances. The use of an EGG can be very useful given that OGI and GCI provide valuable information about the voice short-time dynamics.
The team will also perform a laryngostroboscopic examination to highlight defects in vocal cord mobility, a defect in vocal cord mating in phonation, abnormal vocal cord movements or supraglottic structures.
The primary objective is to compare a global score assessing vocal performance between MSA-P, PD and healthy volunteers. Secondary objectives are 1) to compare an acoustic index, assessing the subsystems of speech production, between MSA-P, PD and healthy volunteers, 2) to compare an acoustic index, assessing types of dysarthria, between MSA-P and PD patients, and 3) to compare perceptual assessment, performed by a panel of experts, of voice alteration between MSA-P and PD patients.
The final goal of this study is to evaluate the validity of the vocal markers that were identified in the previous study (Voice4PD-MSA-I, exploratory cohort). The validation will only consider data collected in the present study in order to assess the performance of the classifiers developed in the exploratory cohort.
4,573 studies on the registry are indexed under Parkinson Disease; 1,086 are open to participants now.
This study's enrollment of 28 is below the median of 40 across 3,353 interventional studies indexed under Parkinson Disease.
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Age from 30 to 80 years old
Patient with PD :
Patients with MSA-P :
Controls :
Deafs and/or mutes
Underlined terms in the criteria open these too. Explained by clinicaltrials.gg, not part of the registry record. The study team decides who can take part.
Before you join, the study team explains what taking part involves — its purpose, what happens, the risks and possible benefits — and answers your questions, so you can decide freely. Consent is usually recorded on a form (the informed consent form, ICF) signed by you or, where the law allows, by someone legally authorised to decide for you.
You can keep asking questions during the study, you are told of new information that matters, and you can choose to leave at any time.
Informed consent
Before you join, the study team explains what taking part involves — its purpose, what happens, the risks and possible benefits — and answers your questions, so you can decide freely. Consent is usually recorded on a form (the informed consent form, ICF) signed by you or, where the law allows, by someone legally authorised to decide for you.
You can keep asking questions during the study, you are told of new information that matters, and you can choose to leave at any time.
Explained by clinicaltrials.gg, not part of the registry record. The study team decides who can take part.
Diagnosis of idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) according to MDS criteria (Postuma et al., 2015)
Procedure: voice recordings
Diagnosis of Multiple Atrophy System (MSA-P) Parkinsonian form possible or probable according to consensus criteria (Gilman et al., 2008)
Procedure: voice recordings
Absence of neurologic and oto-rhino-laryngologic disease
Procedure: voice recordings
A digital processing of voice recordings (from 30 to 45 minutes) will be performed for each participant, using a high quality digital recorder: the DIANA (computerized device of acoustic analysis) and the EVA-2 workstations (assisted Evaluation system Voice)
Evaluation of global vocal performance score based on six acoustic components
1\. Differences between groups (PD, MSA-P, and controls) in global vocal performance score based on six acoustic components (1. Incoordination of articulatory movements: TDV (pseudowords), 2. Difficulty initiating movements: VOT (diadochokinesis), DPI (reading text and monologue), 3. Hyperkinetic movements: stdF0, stdPSD, DVA (held vowel /a/), 4. Reduced range of motion: stdF0 (read text and monologue), 5. Slowness of movement: NSR (read text), DDKR (diadochokinesis), VD (diadochokinesis), and 6. Irregularity of movements: DDKI (diadochokinesis)).
Time frame: Day 1
measurements of a composite acoustic index assessing speech production subsystems
Differences between groups (PD, MSA-P, and controls) in a composite acoustic index, assessing speech production subsystems. The acoustic index will be calculated by linear combinations, described in \[Daoudi et al., 2022\], of features evaluating the performance of subsystems of speech production: breathing, phonation, articulation, prosody and timing.
Time frame: Day 1
measurements of a composite acoustic index assessing hypokinetic, ataxic and spastic dysarthria
Differences between groups (PD and MSA-P) in a composite acoustic index assessing hypokinetic, ataxic and spastic dysarthria. The acoustic index will be calculated by linear combinations, described in \[Daoudi et al., 2022\], of features assessing hypokinetic, ataxic and spastic dysarthria.
Time frame: Day 1
measurements of a vocal impairment score based on perceptual assessment by an expert jury (Range 1-10)
Differences between groups (PD and MSA-P) in a vocal impairment score based on perceptual assessment by an expert jury (Range 1-10). The score between 1 (for inaudible voice) and 10 (for normal voice) is calculated by averaging the sub-scores (between 1 and 10) evaluating intelligibility, articulation, prosody and resonance.
Time frame: Day 1
Plan to share: No
This study is completed, as verified in Apr 2023. You cannot join it, but the record below documents what was studied.
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