How well do you know about Aphasia?

Aphasia: An Overview

Aphasia is a medical condition characterized by an inability to comprehend or formulate language due to damage to specific brain regions.
The major causes of aphasia are stroke and head trauma, but it can also be caused by brain tumors, brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases.
To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person's speech or language must be significantly impaired in one (or more) of the four aspects of communication following acquired brain injury: auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading and writing, and functional communication.
The difficulties of people with aphasia can range from occasional trouble finding words to losing the ability to speak, read, or write, and both expressive and receptive language can be affected.
Aphasia is not caused by damage to the brain that results in motor or sensory deficits; it is related to the individual's language cognition.
Aphasia affects about two million people in the U.S. and 250,000 people in Great Britain, with nearly 180,000 people acquiring the disorder every year in the U.S., 170,000 due to stroke.
The symptoms of aphasia may vary in severity and level of disruption to communication, and the following behaviors are often seen in people with aphasia as a result of attempted compensation for incurred speech and language deficits: circumlocution, neologisms, perseveration, empty speech, and anomia.
Aphasia is most often caused by stroke, but any disease or damage to the parts of the brain that control language can cause aphasia.
Aphasia is best thought of as a collection of different disorders, rather than a single problem.
Localizationist approaches aim to classify the aphasias according to their major presenting characteristics and the regions of the brain that most probably gave rise to them.
Cognitive neuropsychological approaches aim to identify the key language skills or "modules" that are not functioning properly in each individual.
Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative focal dementia that can be associated with progressive illnesses or dementia, such as frontotemporal dementia / Pick Complex Motor neuron disease, Progressive supranuclear palsy, and Alzheimer's disease.
There is a form of aphasia among deaf individuals, as sign languages are forms of language that have been shown to use the same areas of the brain as verbal forms of language.Understanding Aphasia: Causes, Types, and Management
Aphasia is a neurological disorder that affects a person's ability to use and understand language.
The disorder is caused by damage to the language centers of the brain, usually due to a stroke or traumatic brain injury.
There are several types of aphasia, including Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, conduction aphasia, global aphasia, and anomic aphasia.
Aphasia can also affect sign language users, and the severity of the disorder varies depending on the size of the stroke or injury.
In addition to language deficits, many people with aphasia also experience co-occurring cognitive deficits in areas such as attention, memory, and executive functions.
Cognitive deficits can influence language treatment outcomes and the learning process of rehabilitation.
While there is no one treatment proven to be effective for all types of aphasia, studies have shown that treatment has positive outcomes, and therapy ranges from increasing functional communication to improving speech accuracy.
Specific treatment techniques include semantic feature analysis, melodic intonation therapy, and partner training.
The intensity of aphasia therapy is determined by the length of each session, total hours of therapy per week, and total weeks of therapy provided, and the intensity of treatment should be individualized based on the recency of stroke, therapy goals, and other specific characteristics.
If the symptoms of aphasia last longer than two or three months after a stroke, a complete recovery is unlikely, but some people continue to improve over a period of years and even decades.
Improvement is a slow process that usually involves both helping the individual and family understand the nature of aphasia and learning compensatory strategies for communicating.
To decrease the probability of having an ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, people should take precautions such as exercising regularly, not smoking, limiting alcohol consumption, and managing high blood pressure and cholesterol.Neuroimaging tools such as MRI and fMRI are commonly used to identify aphasia and study the extent of damage in the loss of language abilities.

MRI is often used to predict or confirm the subtype of aphasia present, and researchers have compared three subtypes of aphasia using MRI scans.

PET SPM analysis can help predict progression of total loss of speech and functional autonomy in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA) patients.

Apraxia is another disorder often correlated with aphasia, and researchers have found two areas of lesion overlap between patients with apraxia and aphasia.

The use of fMRI and an automatic classifier can help predict language recovery outcomes in stroke patients with 86% accuracy when coupled with age and language test scores.

Diffusion tensor imaging can be used to quantify the improvement in patients after speech and language treatment programs are applied.

Neuroimaging tools serve as a useful method for determining disorder progression, quantification of cortical damage, aphasia subtype, treatment effectiveness, and differentiating diagnosis with correlated disorders.

Research is currently being done using fMRI to witness the difference in how language is processed in normal brains vs. aphasic brains, and drug therapy and brain stimulation are being tested as potential therapeutic combinations with speech-language therapy.

Researchers have multiple ideas on how aphasia could be more effectively treated in the future.