Speech Biomarkers for Quantifying Effects of Subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease.

OBJECTIVE

Dysarthria is one of the most common and disabling side effects of subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) in Parkinson's disease (PD). Stimulation often exacerbates speech dysfunction beyond the effects of PD progression, likely because of current spread to structures surrounding the STN. This study aimed to develop speech biomarkers sensitive to DBS-induced dysarthria by isolating stimulation side effects and mapping their emergence across incrementally increased amplitudes.

METHODS

Twenty-four PD patients with bilateral STN-DBS completed a standardized speech assessment in each hemisphere separately, including sustained phonations, rapid syllable repetitions, and reading passages across 7 increasing stimulation amplitudes defined relative to a clinically determined stimulation-induced dysarthria threshold. A composite dysarthria index based on 7 key acoustic features, patient perceptual self-ratings, and intelligibility scores were extracted.

RESULTS

More than 2,500 speech task recordings were analyzed. Both the composite dysarthria index and subjective self-ratings worsened rapidly with increasing stimulation amplitude above a threshold (p < 0.001), whereas intelligibility scores varied markedly and did not reach significance. Among individual acoustic features, phonation duration, voice quality, and monopitch exhibited significant sensitivity to increasing stimulation amplitudes. Left-sided stimulation induced greater speech deterioration than right-sided stimulation.

INTERPRETATION: We systematically identified speech biomarkers that capture DBS-induced dysarthria, characterized the progressive deterioration of speech with increasing amplitude, and highlighted the pivotal role of left basal ganglia circuitry in speech production. Our objective metric holds promise as safety outcome measure for surgical therapies, guidepost for initial and troubleshooting DBS programming, and input for adaptive, closed-loop stimulation control. ANN NEUROL 2026;100:628-640.