Spl 634 Aphasia

Aphasia is a communication disorder that affects many adults and families. Aphasia occurs as a result of damage to the language-specific areas of the brain (ASHA, 2014). Individuals with aphasia may experience difficulties with oral language, receptive language, memory, attention writing, and reading. There are a myriad of approaches designed for the treatment of aphasia. Two treatment approaches, Promoting Aphasics Communicative Effectiveness (P.A.C.E.) and Constraint Induced Language Therapy (C.I.L.T.), and their efficacy in regard to available evidence will be discussed below.

Language is an ability that many of us take for granted in everyday life. For those with aphasia, it is a daily struggle to overcome and effective communication is a goal to strive for. Aphasia patients are able to think, perhaps as well as the average person, but they simply cannot convey their ideas or thoughts easily. The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination is an excellent examination for the diagnosis of the presence and type of aphasia, and for the location of brain damage. The Minnesota Test for Differential Diagnosis of Aphasia has been shown to be the most comprehensive assessment of the overall patient’s strengths and weaknesses in regard to language; it also allows for physicians to predict recovery accurately. Though it is no longer as popular or applicable as newer diagnostic tests, such as the BDAE, it is still an accurate assessment for aphasia. I think this is the paradox in neurological assessment: as technological advances improve, older assessments are becoming invalidated- though they are not inaccurate assessments. New advances and knowledge are being acquired in medicine every day, therefore there is always room for improvement (Holland, 2008). One of the biggest cons to the two batteries I mentioned in this paper is the fact that they are both time consuming- for both the patient and the

Expressive (motor) Aphasia is a neurological condition that occurs when words cannot be formed, expressed, or may be absent due to an injury to the cerebral cortex. (Brooks & Brooks, 2012).

3. Explain why depression, delirium and age related memory impairment may be mistaken for dementia.

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that affects a person’s ability to understand oral and written language, speaking and writing. It is estimated that one third of those who survive stroke have aphasia (Department of Health, 2007). Most patients with aphasia exhibit spontaneous recovery, usually in the first 2-3 months following stroke onset (Godecke, Hird, Lalor, Rai, & Phillips, 2012). However, 30-40% of these patients may experience long-term post-stroke aphasia (Bakheit et al., 2007). Continued rehabilitative treatments with the speech and language pathologists (SLPs) are not as significantly effective due to the current high demands on limited resources (Palmer et al., 2012), which reduced the availability of face-to-face speech

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.

Standardization of the revised Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination is based on a normative sample of 242 patients with aphasic symptoms tested at the Boston, VA. Medical Center between1976-1982.

Human beings occasionally suffer bad damage to particular parts of their brains. Unfortunately, these injuries may lead to major failure of speech production, understanding language and comprehension which most of the patients suffer it permanently. This impairment is called Aphasia. Gayle (2012) states that people with aphasia fail to understand sentence comprehension although it is a simple sentence. She also mentioned that aphasia patients also have difficulty in reading and understanding speeches. According to Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (2011), aphasia is a scientific term used to explained language disorder due to brain injuries caused by diseases or trauma. In other words, aphasia involves partial or total loss of the ability to

Mesulum (2003) defined primary progressive aphasia as a clinical disorder with gradual onset and progressive dissolution in an individuals' language skills which could be attributed to the degeneration of the frontotemporal region of the brain. According to the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association, (2015) Primary Progressive Apahsia is described as focal dementia which characterized by gradual loss of language function with relatively well unaffected memory skills, and visual processing skills until the later stages

Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language. For most people, these are parts of the left side (hemisphere) of the brain. Aphasia usually occurs suddenly, often as the result of a stroke or head injury, but it may also develop slowly, as in the case of a brain tumor. The disorder impairs the expression and understanding of language as well as reading and writing. “Aphasia may co-occur with speech disorders such as dysarthria or apraxia of speech, which also result from brain damage”. (Sarno 23)

Aphasia is a language disorder that can be the result of a brain injury. An individual that is suffering from aphasia may experience difficulty speaking, writing, reading, or comprehending. There are three different types of Aphasia that differ in various ways. First, Wernicke’s Aphasia is the inability to grasp the meaning of words and sentences that have been produced by another individual. This type of aphasia is also known as “fluent aphasia” or “receptive aphasia”. Wernicke patients’ speech may come across like a jumble of words or jargon, but it is very well articulated and they have no issue producing their own connected speech. If the patient is consecutively making errors, it is common for them to be unaware of their difficulties, and not realize that their sentences don’t make sense. The severity of the disorder varies depending on the patient, and the disorder results form damage in the left posterior temporal region of the brain, which is also known as Wernicke’s area.

Agnosia is a neurological illness most often caused by dementia, strokes, or other neurological diseases but can also be the result of a trauma such as a head injury or infection. Sigmund Freud first proposed the term “Agnosia” in 1891 but, before then, Carl Wernicke, who discovered aphasia, was the first to have some of the ideas of what later became agnosia. In 1877, Kussmaul attempted to reveal the cause of Auditory Verbal Agnosia, commonly known as word deafness. Kussmaul believed that lesions on the left Supramarginal and Angular Gyrus, directly above Wernicke’s area, triggered word deafness.

Definition : Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write.

Apraxia of speech is a Motor Speech Disorder that impacts an individual’s ability to make the plans and preparations necessary to produce speech. Apraxia of speech causes an individual to have difficulty speaking when they want to or are asked to, and also causes the production of words to vary each time the speaker says them. Having this disorder does not impact the individual’s ability to comprehend speech and a person with apraxia of speech knows the message they want to communicate, but they experience a breakdown in trying to formulate and articulate that message properly. In adults this is generally referred to as acquired apraxia of speech, and can be caused by a traumatic brain injury, stroke or some other form of injury to the brain.

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.