Voice can reveal biological aging, but does not predict dementia

The study

However, the team clarified that it is not a diagnostic test for dementia and does not allow us to establish whether an apparently older voice can predict the subsequent development of cognitive deterioration. In the study, the researchers combined hundreds of parameters through machine learning algorithms, including speaking rate, pauses, voice pitch, emotional content, and the amount and organization of verbal production. Using this information, the model was able to estimate a person's chronological age by calculating the difference compared to their actual age. If the system attributes a higher age to the speech than the actual age, the result indicates an apparently older vocal and linguistic profile.

The results

The sample examined included almost 3 thousand adults without cognitive impairment and people with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease and different forms of frontotemporal dementia. The research found that people with a higher-than-expected speaking age showed signs of accelerated aging in several biological and clinical systems. The research team then compared the age of speech with three independent epigenetic clocks based on DNA methylation (tools capable of estimating biological age through chemical modifications of DNA associated with aging). Also in this case a relationship emerged between acceleration of the age of speech and epigenetic indicators. This means that different speech characteristics and biological markers can share information related to aging processes.

The authors: “The entry contains information about aging”

“Our voice appears to contain much more information about aging than we had previously recognized,” said Ibanez, a professor of Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute and School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and senior author of the study. “It reflects both the passage of chronological time and signals from cognition, the brain, the organism's biology, and even the social environment accumulated over a lifetime,” he added. The research, however, "has important limitations", underlines Ibanez, reiterating that "it cannot therefore establish whether a person with a speaking age higher than the chronological age will subsequently develop cognitive deterioration or dementia". According to Ibanez, the broader result concerns the convergence of information normally obtained through very different procedures. "If confirmed through longitudinal studies and in different populations, speech could become one of the most easily used tools on a large scale to monitor healthy and accelerated aging," concluded the researcher.