Standard MRI scans of a person’s tongue could help with early detection and ongoing monitoring of motor neurone disease (MND), according to a new Australian study, Xinhua news agency reports.
People diagnosed with motor neuron disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, have difficulty speaking and swallowing and tend to have less developed tongue muscles, the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia said in a press release published on Thursday.
‘This could serve as an early indicator of neurodegenerative diseases,’ said Thomas Shaw, neuroscientist and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) specialist at UQ, who led the study published in the journal Computers in Biology and Medicine.
‘There are eight interconnected muscles in our tongues, each with a different role to enable us to eat, swallow and speak,’ said Thomas Shaw, adding that in some patients with motor neurone disease (MND), the tongue muscles progressively weaken and atrophy over time.
By examining more than 200 older MRI scans with the help of artificial intelligence and advanced imaging techniques, scientists were able to obtain precise measurements of the volume and shape of muscles in the tongue and found significant differences between people with and without MND.
“People with smaller tongue volumes have the worst prognosis,” said Thomas Shaw, adding that this measurement could indicate life expectancy and enable faster diagnoses for patients with MND, helping to plan treatment and enrolling these people in clinical trials more quickly.
Brooke-Mai Whelan, co-author of the study and specialist in speech therapy at UQ’s Faculty of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said: ‘When tongue function is affected, swallowing can become dangerous and speech difficult to understand.’
“People with MND report that the loss of speech is more devastating than the loss of the ability to eat, drink or walk,” she said, adding that a better understanding of the process of tongue muscle atrophy could allow for earlier and better targeted interventions, such as voice storage on various media to preserve some people’s natural speech. AGERPRES/(AS – editor: Florin Bădescu, online editor: Anda Badea)
The content of the www.agerpres.ro website is intended exclusively for public information. All information published on this site by AGERPRES is protected by the applicable legal provisions. Copying, reproducing, recompiling, modifying, as well as any way of exploiting the content of this website is prohibited. The information transmitted on www.agerpres.ro can be retrieved, in accordance with the applicable legislation, within the limit of 500 characters. Details in the Terms of Use section. If you are interested in receiving AGERPRES news, please contact the Marketing Department – [email protected].
