What sort of speech problems occur in PSP?
The same general area of the brain that controls eye movement also controls movements of the mouth, tongue and throat, and these movements also weaken in PSP. Speech becomes slurred in most patients after 3 or 4 years, on average, although it is the first symptom in a few patients. In Parkinson’s disease, the speech problem is characterized by soft volume and rapid succession of words. In PSP, however, the speech may have an irregular, explosive quality (called spastic speech, a drunken quality (ataxic speech) or may have the features of speech in Parkinson’s disease. Most commonly, there is a combination of at least two of these three features in the speech of PSP. An erroneous impression of senility or dementia can be created by the PSP patient’s combination of speech difficulty, slight forgetfulness, slow (albeit accurate) mental responses, personality change, apathy and poor eye contact during conversation. Dementia of a sort does occur in many people with PSP, however, and is disc
