Tracking Discourse Complexity Preceding Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis: A Case Study Comparing the Press Conferences of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush
Open accessAbstract
Changes in some lexical features of language have been associated with the onset and progression of Alzheimer's disease. Here we describe a method to extract key features from discourse transcripts, which we evaluated on non-scripted news conferences from President Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, and President George Herbert Walker Bush, who has no known diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Key word counts previously associated with cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease were extracted and regression analyses were conducted. President Reagan showed a significant reduction in the number of unique words over time and a significant increase in conversational fillers and non-specific nouns over time. There was no significant trend in these features for President Bush.
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Formal thought disorder is most commonly associated with schizophrenia but is often present in other mental illnesses such as mania and depression.
“FTD is most commonly associated with schizophrenia but is often present in other forms of mental illness such as mania, depression, and several others [89], [90].”
From A Review of Automated Speech and Language Features for Assessment of Cognitive and Thought Disorders (2020) · cites this paper as [90]
Common symptoms of formal thought disorder include poverty of speech, derailment of speech, and semantically incoherent speech.
“Some common symptoms include poverty of speech (alogia), derailment of speech, and semantically incoherent speech (word salad) [90], [91].”
From A Review of Automated Speech and Language Features for Assessment of Cognitive and Thought Disorders (2020) · cites this paper as [90]
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References 19 · Cited by 133
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- [14]Bird S (2006) NLTK: The natural language toolkit. Proceedings of the COLING/ACL on Interactive presentation sessions (Association for Computational Linguistics), pp. 69– 72.
- Authors
- Berisha, V., Wang, S., LaCross, A., & Liss, J.
- Affiliations
- Arizona State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Berisha, Visar
- Venue
- Journal of Alzheimer's Disease
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2015-03-24
- Volume
- 45
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 959-963
- ISSN
- 1387-2877 (ISSN-L)
- 1875-8908
- PMC
- PMC6922000
- OpenAlex
- W1600791756
- Cited by
- 133
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 4
- FWCI
- 12.43
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Journal of Alzheimer s Disease (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (R01DC006859)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
- Keywords
- Alzheimer's disease, discourse complexity
- MeSH terms
- Aged, 80 and over, Alzheimer Disease, Cognition Disorders, Humans, Leadership, Male, Neuropsychological Tests, Disease Progression, History, 20th Century
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