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Speech disturbances (e.g., altered prosody) have been described in symptomatic Huntington's Disease (HD) individuals, however, the extent to which speech changes in gene positive pre-manifest (PreHD) individuals is largely unknown. The speech of individuals carrying the mutant HTT gene is a behavioural/motor/cognitive marker demonstrating some potential as an objective indicator of early HD onset and disease progression. Speech samples were acquired from 30 individuals carrying the mutant HTT gene (13 PreHD, 17 early stage HD) and 15 matched controls. Participants read a passage, produced a monologue and said the days of the week. Data were analysed acoustically for measures of timing, frequency and intensity. There was a clear effect of group across most acoustic measures, so that speech performance differed in-line with disease progression. Comparisons across groups revealed significant differences between the control and the early stage HD group on measures of timing (e.g., speech rate). Participants carrying the mutant HTT gene presented with slower rates of speech, took longer to say words and produced greater silences between and within words compared to healthy controls. Importantly, speech rate showed a significant correlation to burden of disease scores. The speech of early stage HD differed significantly from controls. The speech of PreHD, although not reaching significance, tended to lie between the performance of controls and early stage HD. This suggests that changes in speech production appear to be developing prior to diagnosis.

Altered prosody has been described in symptomatic Huntington’s Disease (HD) individuals, however, the extent to which acoustic analysis of speech is sensitive to gene positive pre-manifest (PreHD) individuals is unknown. Speech samples were acquired from 30 individuals carrying the mutant HTT gene (13 PreHD, 17 early stage HD) and 15 matched controls. Participants read a passage, produced a monologue, counted from 1-20 and said the days of the week. Data were analysed acoustically for measures of timing, frequency and intensity. Tasks were compared to determine their relative sensitivity to disease state. Tasks with greater cognitive demand appeared more suitable for detecting Huntington’s disease compared to tasks with high levels of automaticity.