“Even for people who don’t use their voices professionally like teachers, lawyers or doctors do, when they start to have these difficulties expressing themselves, they’ll start withdrawing from life. Lott, director of the Mayo Clinic Arizona Voice Program. What might also be surprising are the prevalence and dramatically disruptive nature of speech and language problems that worsen with time, says physician David G. “We think of Alzheimer’s disease as being a memory problem, but in younger individuals, language disorders can be the main manifestation of the disease, early on,” Leger says. Gabriel Leger, head of the Young-Onset and Frontotemporal Dementia program at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. That last condition results from degeneration of the brain lobes - frontal and temporal - responsible for human characteristics such as social decorum, judgment and language, says Dr. But the disintegration of speech does often accompany conditions such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia. Although strokes can cause similar difficulties, progressive loss over time isn’t usually associated with them. Progressive speech and language disorders, or a “progressive aphasia,” can encompass everything from having difficulties forming sentences - putting the nouns and verbs in the right places - to opening the mouth and releasing a slurred, garbled mess of sound, rather than words. His memory score was too high, Ruley says. “That would have been a lot better.”īecause of the nature of his disease, which so far affects his speech rather than memory, Sobotka couldn’t get on a trial for a certain Alzheimer’s drug that looked promising for his condition. “After we found out, we really wish it had been a stroke,” Ruley says. When the problems started, a stroke was suspected. What’s that word? Most of the time I know where he’s going, so I can pretty much grab the right word.” Ruley adds, “We play a lot of fill in the blanks. “It’s a puzzle between me and my wife,” says Sobotka, who was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

The problem, Ruley says, is getting the thoughts “from the head to the mouth.” Sobotka, a stockbroker who still does his trade, says his thought process is intact. “You wish,” interjects his wife, Cheryl Ruley.

“Forty-two,” the 65-year-old says, smiling. But when asked his age, he can still crack a joke. He remembers when he first started struggling for words: November 2011.

Another word for running your mouth