Comparison of syntactic comprehension and illness severity in Persian-speaking patients with Parkinson's disease

The relationship between brain and language has always been one of the most important questions in the field of neurology. Most of these studies emphasize the importance of the cerebral cortex in language processing. Importantly, due to limited studies on the importance of subcortical structures in the representation of language, further clinical studies are necessary in this regard. The purpose of this study was to compare the syntactic comprehension and illness severity in Persian-speaking patients with Parkinson's disease.

This cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study was performed using the MMSE questionnaire, Bilingual aphasia test (BAT) and the UPDRS Parkinson's illness severity checklist and Modified Hoehn and Yahr Staging checklist. Participants in this study included 20 patients with Parkinson's disease and 20 normal elderly and data were analyzed using SPSS 20 software.

The findings of this study indicate that there is a significant difference between the two groups of Parkinson's and normal people in syntax comprehension. There was also a statistically significant difference between mean scores of syntactic comprehension in different stages of the disease.

In this study, it was found that as the disease progression, the syntactic comprehension of the patient is reduced.