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Aphasia In America

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Aphasia is a common language disorder. Approximately, 1 in 250 people in United State of America suffer from aphasia according to the estimation of National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke. Fifteen percent of individuals who are under 65 years old are diagnosed with aphasia, the percentage will be raised to 43% in a group of people at the age of 85 or older. People who are diagnosed with aphasia commonly show significant impairment in language and communication skills, consisting of the abilities of writing, reading, verbal expression and auditory comprehension, or significant degeneration in language communication after brain injury (normally a stroke).
Patients with aphasia suffer from similar symptoms. The first one is verbal …show more content…

The idea of categorizing the illness by characteristics and possible damaged brain region is initiated by Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke. People with expressive aphasia have a clear thought about what they are going to say yet they still have difficulties in communicating with people. They still need to pay effort on their speeches and they can not produce complete sentences. The injury causes this kind of aphasia is in the Broca’s area of the left hemisphere. Thereby, people with Broca’s aphasia always have impaired movement on the right side of body. Another major type of aphasia is named as Wernicke’s aphasia, also known as receptive aphasia. A person with Wernicke’s aphasia can speak fluently, however, lack of comprehension. They have no understanding of what they are reading or saying. Even they have fluent conversations, those conversations miss parts or make no sense. Although it is in the left hemisphere, same as the injury of expressive aphasia, the difference is the Wernicke’s aphasia injury is on the posterior left temporal cortex rather in the anterior area. The last major subtype is conduction aphasia, a aphasia where conversation remains fluent and comprehended, but patient may still have repeat difficulty. The damaged brain region is located in the arcuate and the left parietal

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