The assessment and treatment of hypomimia in Parkinson's disease
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Objectifying the assessment and treatment of hypomimia in Parkinson's disease
IRAS ID
275859
Contact name
Tim Grover
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University college London
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Z6364106/2020/05/45 , UCL Data Protection Number
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) often lose the ability to move their face making it difficult to show emotion and speak clearly. They can begin to keep their mouths open and drool. Due to misunderstanding and embarrassment, they may speak less and avoid social situations leading to feelings of isolation.
Due to a of lack detailed assessment and understanding of treatments effects, little attention has been given to assessing and treating this symptom. I would like to make it possible to accurately and easily measure this symptom and look at how current PD treatments affect it.
Currently, assessment is limited to a single item on scale assessing PD symptoms which does not address production of emotional facial expressions. Loss of facial expression is rarely addressed by Speech therapists who are well placed to help, due to a lack of agreed assessment and treatment methods.
There is a way to score facial expression, called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), it takes time and so is not suited to hospital assessment. This is where technology might be useful, Facial Expression Analysis (FEA) is a computer program based on FACS which can quickly and easily measure expression. Its known to be accurate for healthy people but has not been assessed for people with PD. It could be used to assess severity and the effects of PD treatments, this makes up the three stages of this research.
Firstly, to show the program can identify the difference between people with and without PD, secondly, to compare PD patients with and without medication and thirdly, patients with and without Deep Brain Stimulation treatment ((DBS) an implanted pacemaker in the brain). Those scores will be compared to existing methods of assessment. In addition, we aim to assess the link to speech, drooling, loneliness, facial expression recognition, disease severity and disease duration.
REC name
London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/PR/0667
Date of REC Opinion
7 Jan 2021
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion