Active clinical trials for "Aphasia"

This study will investigate the effects of mild electrical stimulation in conjunction with speech therapy for people with post-stroke aphasia to enhance language recovery.

There are very few treatments for neurodegenerative disorders, and the efficacy of these treatments is generally modest. Recent studies have shown a short-term positive effect of non-invasive neuromodulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in primary progressive aphasia (PPA). PPA is a clinical syndrome associated with Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal degeneration. The aim of this study is to compare the effect of TMS and language therapy versus language therapy and sham TMS in patients with PPA during 6 months. A prospective, randomized, controlled, double-blind and parallel clinical trial will be conducted. The changes in brain metabolism using FDG-PET, language, neuropsychiatric symptoms, and daily-living activities will be assessed. Connectivity changes using electroencephalography will also be examined. In addition, a subgroup of patients will be assessed with multimodal MRI (structural and functional), and blood biomarkers. As a result of this project, valuable information about the long-term efficacy of non-invasive brain stimulation in PPA will be obtained, as well as the mechanisms of the therapy and clinical and neuroimaging factors associated with therapy response.

Speech-language therapy is generally found to be helpful in the rehabilitation of aphasia. However, not all patients with aphasia have access to adequate treatment to maximize their recovery. The goal of this project is to compare the efficacy of telerehabilitation or Aphasia Remote Therapy (ART) to the more traditional In-Clinic Therapy (I-CT).

This is a double-blind, sham-controlled, crossover study in which subjects with the non-fluent/agrammatic and semantic variants of primary progressive aphasia (naPPA and svPPA, respectively) will undergo language testing and structural and functional brain imaging before and after receiving 10 semi-consecutive daily sessions of real or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with modified constraint-induced language therapy (mCILT). Language testing and brain imaging will be repeated immediately after completion of and up-to 24 weeks following completion of treatment. The investigators will examine changes in language performance induced by tDCS + mCILT compared to sham tDCS + mCILT. The investigators will also use network science to analyze brain imaging (fMRI) data to identify network properties associated with baseline PPA severity and tDCS-induced changes in performance. This study will combine knowledge gained from our behavioral, imaging, and network data in order to determine the relative degrees to which these properties predict whether persons with PPA will respond to intervention.

Of the 15,000 Veterans who are hospitalized for stroke each year more than half experience spatial and motor impairments and pain. Spatial-motor-sensory problems limit functioning and independence, which is costly to Veterans, their families, and society. Currently, spatial-motor-sensory problems are targeted using different treatments. However, there is a treatment that has shown promise in simultaneously targeting spatial function, motor function and pain in right-brain stroke. The investigators propose to investigate the feasibility of using adapted spatial-motor sensory assessment and treatment procedures for Veterans with left-brain stroke who have language and cognitive impairment. The next step will be to conduct a large-scale study focused on this multi-target treatment for more efficient and effective stroke rehabilitation. The investigators expect this line of research to increase functioning, independence and quality of life in Veteran stroke survivors.

SEMO is a multidisciplinary project (language sciences, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, neurology, speech-language pathology, functional neuroimaging and engineering sciences) that aims first, to test and develop a novel speech rehabilitation program designed for patients with non-fluent aphasia and, second, to better describe neural reorganization after successful recovery. To this end, the investigators will conduct a prospective monocentric cross-over study, including two cohorts of post-stroke aphasic patients and two control groups.

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative disease in which language function is gradually and progressively impaired. Patients will eventually be disabled in communication and have cognition deficits, which put a heavy burden not only on their families but also on the whole society. However, no effective treatment for PPA has been explored so far. The current clinical randomized trial is to study the safety and efficacy of repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) for the treatment of PPA. Also, multi-modality of neuroimaging techniques, such as functional MRI and PET will be used to investigate brain network changing in this procedure.

The main aim of the study is to investigate the effect of a novel, speeded anomia therapy (Conroy et al., 2018) in a large population of patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia. The treatment will be delivered via a web application (QuickWord).

The study aims to assess a individual or group therapy's effectiveness in grammatical time marking. The main objective is to examine whether the therapy improves grammatical time marking of inflected verbs treated on the sessions. We also explore whether the observed progress can be transferred to untrained items, more ecological contexts and if is maintained two and four weeks after the end of treatment. This therapy will be administered to nine individuals with brain lesions after stroke. Five individuals will take part of the individual therapy and four individuals will take part of the group therapy (two individuals per group). The therapy will last one month, at the rate of three weekly sessions of approximately one hour.

This study focuses on developing a novel treatment for sentence production and comprehension in aphasia, using implicit priming. First set of experiments will aim examine which priming conditions are most effective in creating maximal learning effects. Then, in a later experiment, the investigators will develop and test the efficacy of a novel treatment study based on findings from the first set of the experiments.