Acoustic voice assessment in Parkinson's disease patients submitted to posteroventral pallidotomy.

UNLABELLED Long-term complications in levodopa treated Parkinson's disease (PD) patients caused a resurgence of interest in pallidotomy as an option of treatment. However, postoperative complications such as speech disorders can occur. PURPOSE The aim of this study is to evaluate the acoustic voice in PD patients, before and after posteroventral pallidotomy. METHOD Twelve patients with PD were submitted to neurological and voice assessments during the off and on phases, in the pre-operative, 1st and 3rd post-operative months. The patients were evaluated with the UPDRS and the vocal acoustic parameters -- f0, NHR, jitter, PPQ, Shimmer, APQ (using the software MultiSpeech-Kay Elemetrics-3700). RESULTS The off phase UPDRS scores revealed a tendency to improvement at the 1st month and the off phase worsened. The shimmer and APQ improved. CONCLUSION This study shows that pallidotomy has little improvement on functional use of communication of PD patients.