A relação da postura corporal com a prosódia na Doença de Parkinson – estudo de caso

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: the aim of the present work was to investigate the relationship between the body posture and the prosody in patients with Parkinson Disease. METHODS: the study was carried out with five patients (four males and one female) from Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil, by means of cross-section study, in 2006. Avaliations of linguistic and emotional prosody as well as analysis of body posture were performed. The statistical analysis used was correlation descriptive. RESULTS: the subjects of this work were four men and one woman aged between 37 and 53 years old. Three of those patients were classified in stage I of the disease; one in the stage III and the other one in the stage IV according to the classification of the motor function from Hohen & Yahr. All of them were under medication and presenting the signals of the characteristic triad of that pathology: rigidity, tremor and bradykinesia, as well as the typical alterations of body posture. Comparison between linguistic prosody and emotional prosody, subjects showed the best performance in emotional prosody and it does not shown associations between the stages of the disease and the alterations on body posture and prosody. CONCLUSIONS: Body posture alterations are the characteristic signals of Parkinson Disease as well as the disturbs on linguistic and emotional prosody. The occurrence of posture alterations was high in patients with Parkinson disease. Subjects presented better performance in emotional prosody. There was no evidences that the stages of the disease were related to prosody or body posture alterations.