Assessment of Language Disorders in Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Summary

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous systems that results in focal inflammatory lesions and then diffuse and degenerative inflammatory phenomena. It is considered to be the leading cause of non-traumatic disability in young adults.

Cognitive impairment is a common and disabling part of MS. Studies carried out in the years 1990-2000 estimated their frequency to be between 40 and 60% of MS patients: they reflect the natural history of the disease. Effective treatments for the inflammatory component of the disease that are now available may have led to a reduction in their frequency.

Cognitive disorders were identified at an early stage of the disease and affect certain areas preferentially:

* The most common achievement is the reduction in the speed of information processing. It is present from the early stage of the disease. Progressive deterioration over time is observed, which is a prognostic factor for long-term cognitive decline.

Long-term memory was impaired in 40-65% of patients in historical cohorts. More specifically, encoding and retrieval were affected, with storage and consolidation being preserved.

* The attainment of executive functions is also common.
* Phonemic and semantic fluency are also disturbed in MS patients. Among cognitive impairments, language impairment has been little studied in MS: in 2016 only 22 controlled studies were identified. The assessments carried out were most often partial, making it impossible to define the characteristics or to conclude that specific linguistic impairments are independent of other cognitive impairments. Finally, recent studies suggest that the frequency of language impairment in MS may be underestimated.

Therefore, it seems important to assess the prevalence of language disorders in a large cohort of patients with RRMS or MS, and to characterize these disorders by identifying the linguistic processes involved and the brain substrates involved. This will make it possible to envisage the implementation of more systematic screening for language disorders in MS and to improve patient management, in particular by developing targeted rehabilitation protocols.

Conditions

• Sclerosis
• Language Disorders

Interventions

OTHER

Case

Battery of standardised and normalised tests evaluating different cognitive functions Experimental language tasks MRI

OTHER

Withness

Experimental language tasks MRI

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Groupe Hospitalier Pitie-Salpetriere

  collaborator OTHER

• Saint Antoine University Hospital

  collaborator OTHER

• Fondation Ophtalmologique Adolphe de Rothschild

  lead NETWORK

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

60 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-08-17

Primary Completion

2020-08-17

Completion

2022-07-08

Countries

• France

Study Locations