A distinctive alteration of speech has been reported in patients suffering from ephedrone-induced parkinsonism. However, an objective assessment of dysarthria has not been performed in ephedrone users. We studied 28 young Caucasian men from Georgia with a previous history of ephedrone abuse and compared them to 25 age-matched healthy controls. Speech examination, brain MRI, and NNIPPS-Parkinson plus scale were performed in all patients. The accurate differential diagnosis of dysarthria subtypes was based on the quantitative acoustic analyses of 15 speech dimensions. We revealed a distinct variant of mixed dysarthria with a combination of hyperkinetic and hypokinetic components representing the altered motor programming of dystonia and bradykinesia in ephedrone-induced parkinsonism. According to acoustic analyses, all patients presented at least one affected speech dimension, whereas dysarthria was moderate in 43 % and severe in 36 % of patients. Further findings indicated relationships between motor subscores of dystonia and bradykinesia and speech components of loudness (r = −0.54, p < 0.01), articulation (r = 0.40, p < 0.05), and timing (r = −0.53, p < 0.01). In ephedrone-induced parkinsonism a prominent mixed hyperkinetic–hypokinetic dysarthria occurs that appears related to marked dystonia and bradykinesia and probably reflects manganese induced toxic and neurodegenerative damage to the globus pallidus internus and substantia nigra.
