Speech change

shamrock57

My lo, all of a sudden, has totally and suddenly changed how she talks. No disrespect intended, she talks like Forrest Gump. Is this normal for alz. patients?

MN Chickadee

Language changes can be normal for Alz but not necessarily so suddenly. Any sudden change warrants a call to the doctor and a check for a urinary tract infection. A UTI can be otherwise unnoticed and "silent" in people with dementia.  Some don't report pain or discomfort, the only symptom is an odd change or decline. A sudden change in mobility, a fall, a change in language, suddenly being combative etc. I would also want to rule out a stroke or some other cause. If you don't turn anything up like that it could just be the progression. Language skills definitely do become affected as the disease progressed. We never had anything so sudden with our journey, these changes were over the span of weeks or months. 

jfkoc

Ditto...check for UTI ( the sticks are not reliable) and stroke asap.

harshedbuzz

What do you mean?

The southern drawl? Or are you referring to the simplistic vocabulary? Is odd prosody? Or the flat affect with which he speaks? There's a story that Hanks based his speech as Forest Gump on the child actor who played him; the kid tended to over enunciate words.

As others have pointed out, any completely out of the blue symptom or behavior change could be the result of a UTI. Abrupt speech changes can be the result of a stroke. Sometimes, in vascular dementia the disease progression occurs in a series of steps and plateaus that are thought to be the result of TIAs or mini-strokes. It is possible to have both Alzheimer's and VD.

For many, word finding becomes a problem as cognition is impacted- sometimes a simpler or broader word is substituted (girl to mean niece or daughter, for example), sometimes a place-hold word like "thing" is used or sometimes a person will describe the use of an object. 

Many PWD have apathy as a symptom and that can be reflected in a flat affect (where speech does not convey emotion). 

Prosody, the music of language, is impacted by not fully understanding what one is saying (aphasia, word salad) or by the effort put into word finding. 

HB