MentalHealthDaily

Facial Markers Differed in 31 Older Adults With MCI-Level MoCA Scores

by GLOOM

MHD featured image for resting facial expression markers and MCI-level cognition.

A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that older adults with mild-cognitive-impairment-level MoCA-J scores showed distinct resting facial action-unit patterns: AU10 upper lip raiser, AU23 lip tightener, and AU28 lip suck differed after correction in 45 analyzable participants.1 The result supports facial-expression screening research, but it does not show that a face video can diagnose MCI or …

Dysarthria Speech Biomarker Tracked Severity Across 5 Languages

by GLOOM

MHD featured image for dysarthria speech biomarkers, phonological subspace collapse, and cross-language severity tracking.

A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that a training-free speech biomarker tracked dysarthria severity across 890 speakers, 10 corpora, and 5 full-pipeline languages, with all 5 consonant d-prime features showing random-effects correlations with clinical severity (rho = −0.50 to −0.56; all p < 2e−4). Research Highlights Speech-severity signal was broad: Muller et al. evaluated 890 speakers …