Speech clocks reflect dementia phenotypes and biological aging markers
A cross-national analysis of Latin American participants connected speech age gaps to epigenetic age, brain clocks, and cognitive decline.
Science advances · 30 Sept · Hernandez H, Pedraza LK, Santamaria-Garcia H et al.
Researchers evaluated 2,928 individuals across five Latin American countries, including healthy controls and patients with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, and frontotemporal dementia. Using multimodal acoustic and linguistic features, the team trained supervised models to estimate chronological age and derived speech age gaps. These speech age gaps differentiated healthy individuals from patient groups, showing progressively higher values from Alzheimer's disease to non-language-dominant and language-dominant frontotemporal dementia. Speech gaps associated with clinical and cognitive domains, as well as the social exposome. In patients with Alzheimer's disease, speech gaps correlated with phosphorylated tau. They also associated with structural and functional brain clocks across dementia subtypes, and correlated with Hannum, Retroclock, and OMICmAge epigenetic clocks.
Why it matters
The findings show that noninvasive acoustic and linguistic features capture multilevel biological aging variation. This highlights speech as a potential low-cost, culturally adaptable biomarker for geroscience and dementia research.
Caveats
The study is observational and cross-sectional, assessing speech age gaps at single timepoints. The cohort was also limited to five Latin American nations, requiring further testing across other global populations.
The paper
Speech clocks decode dementia phenotypes, social exposome, and biological aging
Hernandez H, Pedraza LK, Santamaria-Garcia H et al.
Science advances
doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aef9864