Active clinical trials for "Aphasia"

The aim of the study is to determine virtual reality (VR) impact during standard program of rehabilitation on emotional state of patients with aphasia.

Most of us take being able to communicate for granted. Anomia (word finding problems) after stroke can cause profound frustration and anxiety for patients and families. Some people recover; many don't. ~ 250,000 people in the UK have chronic speech and language problems post-stroke. This project will investigate how treatment for these people might be improved. The brain's speech areas can be stimulated using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The kit is simple; a battery powering electrodes placed on the scalp. Healthy people who had tDCS while naming pictures could find words quicker and their speech areas responded more efficiently. How it affects aphasic stroke patients' brain function is unknown.

The aging Veteran population will substantially increase over the next 10 years, as the 24.9% of Veterans who are currently between 55-64 years of age join the 38.5% who are already over age 65. The risk of stroke more than doubles each decade after age 55, which places Veterans at an ever-increasing risk of suffering stroke-related language impairment (i.e., aphasia). Difficulty retrieving words, which negatively impacts psychosocial well-being and quality of life, is the most common complaint in healthy aging and aphasia. Word retrieval interventions to maintain or restore communicative function are needed. Studies have shown that physical exercise can improve word learning in young adults. This study will investigate the effects of exercise on word learning in aging and aphasia. The results will help the us understand how exercise may be used to optimize word retrieval interventions for our aging Veterans.

iTALKBetter will provide an app-based therapy for people with word retrieval difficulties who have had a stroke. This study aims to test the therapy application for people with naming difficulties through a small scale randomized controlled trial.

This is a study on Internet-based video-practice speech and language therapy for persons with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), or related conditions.

The few studies looking systematically into the neurophysiological and neuropsychological components of available therapies for chronic aphasia are highly heterogeneous in nature. Results from these studies have, unsurprisingly, indicated heterogeneous results, such as dissimilar neural outcomes associated with neuropsychological gains. There is, therefore, no consensus of how a successful therapy- that is, one that produces a measurable language gain in either production or comprehension -impacts the functional language networks of the brain in a specific type of aphasia population. A recent study has shown that inner speech (the imagination of speech) involves networks and areas dissociable from those implicated in speech production. Further, behavioural analysis has shown an interesting discrepancy between inner speech and overt speech (also called speech production) in a small chronic aphasia population: some participants elicited poor inner speech coupled with relatively intact overt speech, while others elicited relatively intact inner speech coupled with poor overt speech. This unexplored discrepancy implies that inner speech and speech production are dissociable, though share similar networks. This discrepancy, and the notion that these speech components share a similar network, drives this study's hypothesis that improvement in speech production after rehabilitation might be facilitated by an intact inner speech network. Much as good athletes visualise their performance before the actual event in order to increase their chances of success, so too might intact inner speech facilitate speech production, helping to visualise the word in order to increase the success of produced speech. By studying a specific component of speech-inner speech-in a relatively homogeneous population of chronic expressive aphasics, the present study provides an explicit, critical means of understanding neurophysiological (as assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging) and neuropsychological (as assessed by language batteries and personal questionnaires/interviews) changes occurring during speech therapy. As a secondary objective, this study will explore the effectiveness, feasibility and adherence to an at-home computerised aphasia software delivered via a portable tablet.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) influences lexical access and language production. The experimental paradigm will assess the impact of prefrontal stimulation by tDCS versus sham tDCS (S-tDCS) over the PFC of patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia during three language production tasks and a nonverbal executive functions task.

The purpose of this study is to determine if transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in conjunction with intensive speech therapy will improve sentence production and word retrieval in individuals with chronic post stroke aphasia.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of 10 sessions of anodal transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS - 1 mA) applied to left Cortex DorsoLateral PreFrontal (CDLPF) of Alzheimer's or Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) patients compared to the application of a placebo tDCS (sham procedure) on cognitive functions, which are evaluated at short term (1 week post-treatment) and mild term (3 weeks post-treatment). After unblinding, patients who received placebo treatment could be received active tDCS.

Aphasia, the loss or impairment of language caused by brain damage, is one of the most devastating cognitive impairments of stroke. Aphasia can be treated with combination of speech-language therapy and drugs. Conventional speech-language therapy in chronic aphasic subjects is of little help and several drugs have been studied with limited success. Therefore other therapeutic strategies are warranted. Recent data suggest that drugs (memantine) acting on the brain chemical glutamate may help the recovery of cognitive deficits, included language, in subjects with vascular dementia. The present study examines the safety profile and efficacy of memantine paired with intensive language therapy in subjects with stroke-related chronic aphasia (more than 1 yr. of evolution).