Neurological Injuries

Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. Aphasia is always due to injury tote brain-most commonly from a stroke, particularly in older individuals. But brain injuries resulting in aphasia may also arise from head trauma, from brain tumors, or from infections (National Aphasia Association)

The nervous system is a complex arrangement of nerves and specialized cells called the neurons carry messages to and from the brain and the spinal cord to different parts of the body. Nervous system is consisted of the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system is made up of the brain and the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system is made up of nerves that are outside the brain and spinal cord. Nervous system diseases affect the functioning of the human nervous system consisting of the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system and one such disorder is aphasia. Aphasia is a neurological disorder that is caused by damage to the portions of the brain which is responsible for communication. Aphasia damages the left part of the brain that contains language and is usually caused by stroke but at the same time can be caused by other diseases such as brain tumors, infection, head injury, or dementia that damages the brain. There are four types of aphasia and they are expressive aphasia, receptive aphasia, anomic aphasia, and global aphasia.

W.C., a 26 year 11 month old woman, was brought to the Florida Atlantic University-Communication Disorders Clinic (FAU-CDC) by her boyfriend for a Speech-Language Evaluation. She was referred to the FAU-CDC by her neurologist for word finding difficulties and a possible articulation disorder after a left hemisphere hemorrhagic stroke one month ago. According to her boyfriend, W.C.’s symptoms began immediately following her stroke and are characterized by word finding difficulties, slowed and choppy speech, and mispronunciation of certain consonants that is affecting intelligibility along with a strained voice.

Specifically, right-sided hemiparesis involves injury to the left side of the brain, which controls language and speaking (aphasia). People who have this type of hemiparesis may also have troubles in understanding what people say and/or problems talking. In some cases, excluding left and right sides in the body. (Weiss T.C.; 2010)

The left side of the brain is normally tasked with controlling speech and understanding language. So, if a stroke affects the left side of the brain, it is possible for it to affect that person's ability to speak or to understand what is being said. This is part of a condition known as aphasia.

Ambulation, Atrophy, Anguish. Due to a failure in muscle nourishment, people that suffer with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis suffer with paralyzes. This unfortunate, incurable disease impacts a person mentally and physically; victims have knowledge of what happens around them, but cannot respond to change. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, also known as CTE, is obtained when a person suffers from repetitive head injuries. CTE has four main different ailments that cause the victims to respond to CTE in different ways. Recent studies have shown that athletes are more vulnerable to concussions and head traumas, because they typically experience physical contact with other athletes. Due to personal problems

Broca (1861) was treating a patient who had suffered a stroke and found that the patient could understand language but was unable to produce language - despite his vocal tract and other production components being intact. The individual was able to mumble some small words such as “tan” but it he no longer had the ability to create sentences. Broca identified that the left inferior frontal lobe was damaged in his patient’s brain and he labelled this the ‘Broca's area’. Similarly, Wernicke (1876) who reported a stroke victim aged 26 who had the ability to speak freely but made little sense (could produce language but was unable to comprehend language). This patient had a brain lesion in the posterior region of the superior temporal gyrus in the left hemisphere - which is now known as ‘Wernicke's area’ (as cited in Gazzaniga et al, 2014). Therefore, there is sufficient evidence to suggest a double dissociation between language production and language comprehension as they are controlled by independent parts of the

According to sources, Aphasia is described as a communication disorder that usually affects the use of acquired spoken or written language (Halpern & Goldfarb, 2013). Patients that have been diagnosed with aphasia in general usually have difficulties with auditory understanding, reading comprehension, written language difficulties and of course difficulty in spoken language expression (Halpern & Goldfarb, 2013). One of the most essential areas that patients with aphasia want to see improvements in is the ability to have functional spoken communication (Mayer, 2003). It is vital that clinicians focus on the needs of the patient by introducing the patient to different therapy techniques that will benefit them outside of the treatment environment

The aim of Maddy, Capiluto & McComas (2014) was to review the research evaluating the effectiveness of semantic feature analysis on reducing anomia in individuals with aphasia. They used seven databases to search for articles, and seven terms. The author’s search initially identified eighty-eight articles, eighteen of which were relevant. The authors then focused on research that was experimental in nature, examined semantic feature analysis as a treatment method, and included participants that were adults with neurological injury. Next, the parameters included that the articles had to be written in English, and had to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal from 1980 to June 2013. The authors did not include research that looked at semantic feature analysis in combination with another treatment approach. This left the authors with a total of eleven articles to review.

If you were to have a stroke that resulted in aphasia similar to Luke’s situation, how would your life change? Talk to each other and discuss how you would modify your educational, social, or life goals. Additionally, what would be your expectations regarding a) your family and/or friends’ involvement in your recovery and b) your speech-language therapy plan?

(1724) say that communicate problems after brain injury are very common. Although most of us take it for granted, the ability to communicate requires extremely complex skills and may different parts of the brain are involved. There are four main categories of the effects of brain injury. McMurray & Munson (1351) stated that from these effects to the brain, communication problems, such as: 1) physical - affecting how the body works, 2) cognitive - affecting how the person thinks, learns and remembers, 3) emotional - affecting how the person feels, and 4) behavioral - affecting how a person acts. Meronen et al. (214) mention that many people will experience more than one form of communication problem after brain injury, depending on the areas of the brain affected and the severity of the injury. It is also important to recognize that stuck problems may occur alongside other changes in physical, cognitive, emotional and behavioral

I will start with a statistic of aphasic patients, either just only in the US or around the world. This will depend on the avaibility of my sources, which I am still searching. I will also include a statistic showing aphasia is one of the most impactful thing to happen to a person, among other diseases or disorders. This is also where I will include my point where even though aphasia is ranked the first in bringing negative impact to a person, it still ranked very far below in terms of public awareness. I will also discuss a research, or survey, regarding public awareness towards this disorder. Then, I will continue with my thesis

The purpose of this paper is to pursue one important and fundamental aim: language and the brain are purely inseparable since it allows us to perform essential tasks such as generating, comprehending and expressing speech. With damage to the brain, individuals can no longer perform such tasks which can ultimately lead to many types of language disorders. The focus of this paper is Broca’s aphasia, a language disorder characterized by the inability to produce written and spoken speech. Damage to the brain can cause many types of speech impairments as well as comprehension deficits.

Aphasia is caused when the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged. Stroke patients with aphasia have difficulties comprehending and producing language, reading and writing. When aphasia is severe, almost all forms of communication can be lost making it very difficult to recover (National

Individuals with bilingual aphasia regaining language abilities post-brain injury have been observed to exhibit several different patterns of recovery. Bilingual persons with aphasia (PWA) often demonstrate impairments in both their languages, which may or may not be consistent with their pre-stroke language dominance (Fabbro, 1999, 2000, 2001; Paradis, 1995, 1998, 2001). Paradis (2001) reviewed published reports of bilingual PWA and found that a majority of them (61%) demonstrated equal recovery of language abilities in both languages, analogous to their proficiency prior to brain injury (parallel recovery). In the other participants, language recovery post-stroke was marked by better recovery in one language compared to the other (differential recovery; 18%), inappropriate mixing of the two languages (blended recovery; 9%), recovery of one language only (selective recovery; 7%) or recovery of one language after another (successive recovery; 5%). Fabbro (2001) evaluated the recovery profiles of 20 right-handed, high-proficiency bilingual PWA and also found a predominance of parallel recovery (65%) followed by differential recovery (35%). But despite the higher prevalence of parallel recovery, relatively