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Spontaneous speech of patients with gliomas in eloquent areas before and early after surgery

  • Clinical Article - Brain Tumors
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Abstract

Background

Glioma patients often complain about problems in daily conversation. A detailed spontaneous speech analysis could provide more insight in these communicative problems; no previous studies are reported.

Objective

To select sensitive parameters in spontaneous speech pre- and post-operatively in patients with gliomas in eloquent areas.

Methods

We included 27 patients and 21 healthy controls. In addition to a naming and category fluency test, spontaneous speech was collected 1 month pre-operatively and 3 months post-operatively, and analysed with the variables: Self-corrections, Repetitions, Lexical Diversity, Incomplete Sentences and Mean Length of Utterance (MLUw). A correlation analysis was performed between the linguistic variables and tumour characteristics (grade, localisation and volume), treatment related factors, and between the linguistic variables and the language tasks.

Results

Pre-operatively, patients produced more Incomplete Sentences than the controls (p < 0.001). Post-operatively, patients’ utterance length (MLUw) (p < 0.05) was also deviant. The quality of the spontaneous speech was influenced by tumour grade and localisation. There was no influence of tumour volume or treatment-related factors. Pre- and post-operatively, patients’ performance on the naming and the fluency task deviated from normal (p < 0.001). The majority of the linguistic variables did not correlate with the language tasks, pointing to a measurement of distinct linguistic aspects.

Conclusion

Pre- and post-operatively there was a disorder in naming, category fluency and spontaneous speech, partly influenced by tumour characteristics. A spontaneous speech analysis appeared to be a valuable addition to standardised language tasks. Both measurements are important tools to obtain a complete linguistic profile.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the European Low Grade Glioma Network (LGG) for elaborate discussions on this work at the 2012 Annual LGG Meeting in Toulouse, France.

Conflicts of interest

None.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus MC—University Medical Center, Dr. Molewaterplein 50-60, PO Box 2040, 3015 GE, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Djaina Satoer, Arnaud Vincent, Clemens Dirven & Evy Visch-Brink

  2. Departments of Radiology, Erasmus MC—University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Marion Smits

Authors
  1. Djaina Satoer
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  2. Arnaud Vincent
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  3. Marion Smits
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  4. Clemens Dirven
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  5. Evy Visch-Brink
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Djaina Satoer.

Additional information

Presentation at conference

Portions of this work were presented as an oral presentation at the 2012 European Low Grade Glioma Network Meeting in Toulouse, France, and at the 13th International Science of Aphasia conference in Groningen, The Netherlands

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Satoer, D., Vincent, A., Smits, M. et al. Spontaneous speech of patients with gliomas in eloquent areas before and early after surgery. Acta Neurochir 155, 685–692 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00701-013-1638-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00701-013-1638-8

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