Active clinical trials for "Aphasia"

People with aphasia often understand spoken utterances better than written sentences. They also benefit from having content appear in multiple rather than single modalities. Because text-to-speech (TTS) systems accommodate both of these functions, it provides an ideal basis for a reading intervention. TTS systems convert written text to provide both text and auditory information. Research about using TTS supports with people with aphasia has not extended beyond basic case studies and our studies of sentence level comprehension. Hence, no evidence exists about varying TTS features-such as speech output, speech rate, and text highlighting-known to benefit others with reading problems. Also, social acceptance of TTS is not well understood, even though it is critical to adoption and long-term use of the technology. The purpose of this study is to evaluate various aspects of multimodality presentation of material through TTS systems used by people with aphasia. The immediate outcome of the proposed research will be evidence-based recommendations for selecting and adjusting TTS systems and features. This work will enable clinicians to maximize benefits for adults with varying aphasia profiles. We also will obtain initial evidence about the social validity and perceived value of TTS system use for this population.

Impaired speech production is a major obstacle to full participation in life roles by stroke survivors with aphasia and apraxia of speech. The proposed study will demonstrate the short-term effects of auditory masking on speech disfluencies and identify individual factors that predict a positive response, enabling future work to develop auditory masking as a treatment adjuvant targeting long-term improvement in speech. Providing an additional treatment option for adults with aphasia and apraxia of speech will have the clear benefit of improving quality of life and allowing individuals to participate more actively in their health care decisions through improved communication.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how dementia affects activity in different parts of the brain.

This study will look at the way activity within the brain changes over time while a person is trying to think about certain everyday concepts. To measure brain activity accurately, we will be using electrodes placed on people's brains during awake brain surgery.

Over one million persons in the United States are aphasic subsequent to a stroke. Most of the individuals improve through spontaneous recovery and treatment. However, there are no precise methods for predicting which patients will improve and, for those who do, how much improvement will occur. There is a need to improve prognostic precision in aphasia. The purpose of this investigation is to test the precision of auditory evoked responses (AERs) to provide a prognosis for improvement in aphasia subsequent to a left hemisphere thromboembolic infarct. We hypothesize that the presence, absence, and pattern of the AER responses will predict severity of aphasia and prognosis for improvement. Phonemic, phonologic, semantic, and syntactic language tasks will be used to elicit AERs, including the auditory late response, the mismatch negativity response (MMN), the N400, and the P600.

The observational study aims to investigate the effect of two factors that influence the ease with which aphasic and healthy participants name visual stimuli. The main factors investigated here are the image type of the visual stimulus (drawing or photographic image) and the response variety (standard language vs dialect). The hypothesis is formulated as follows: The image type of the visual stimulus (drawing or photographic image) and the response variety (standard language or dialect) will have an effect on naming correctness and/or naming latencies in people with aphasia within the picture naming test. The experiment was as follows: Persons with aphasia and healthy participants were presented with objects and verbs depicted as photographs or illustrations on a tablet. All participants were asked to name the depicted term in two different language varieties as correctly and as fast as possible. Answers were recorded synchronously. No feedback should be given to the participants (=no therapy). The results of picture naming were not analyzed patient-specifically in relation to their condition or therapy. Naming performance was collected as a momentary data set in order to investigate the speed of naming in general. The ethic committee Northwestern and Central Switzerland approved the study to be observational as no effect of intervention(s) on biomedical or other health related outcomes were evaluated, but only the influence of type of the visual stimulus and the response variety on correctness and naming latencies in the two participant groups.

Post stroke aphasia (PSA) is one of the most frequently happened deficiency of stoke, affecting speaking,comprehension, writing and reading of language. Generally, PSA is commonly seen in cortical damage, but in recent years it has been found that subcortical injury is also an important cause of PSA, which is called subcortical aphasia. Using fMRI technology, the investigators aim to investigate the language function of patients with subcortical cerebral infarction at different stages of recovery , and explored the mechanism of post-injury language reorganization in the brain. The investigators recruited 60 first-episode acute cerebral infarction patients with one-side lesion in subcortical white matter (40 with left injury and 20with right injury) and 20 health volunteers. All participants are right-handed, and screened with MMSE, HAMD and HAMA to exclude cases of psychosis, post-stroke dementia and depression. Each participant was arranged to have three test sessions at different stages after the infarction (T1:within 3 days after onset of the stroke ; T2:28 ±3days after onset; T3: 90±3days after onset), with fMRI and Western aphasia battery (WAB) in each session. The purpose of this study is to explore the pathogenesis of subcortical aphasia, and to understand the dynamic reorganization of language network during the recovery of language function.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) includes three variants. Two such variants, the non-fluent/agrammatic variant (nfvPPA) and the logopenic variant (lvPPA), are characterized by progressive word-finding difficulties and effortful speech. Efforts to slow or halt this progression have been largely unsuccessful. As such, there is a desperate need for novel treatment strategies in PPA. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a safe, non-invasive way of stimulating cortical targets in a focal and reproducible manner. Therapeutic benefits from rTMS have been demonstrated when it is applied in many sequential sessions. For example, repeated sessions of rTMS to left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is approved by the US Food and Drug administration as a treatment for major depressive disorder. With respect to language, high frequency rTMS increases the response rate for picture naming in healthy individuals. rTMS has also been shown to improve the number of correct naming responses in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Further, in a sham controlled study, Cotelli and colleagues demonstrated that in a group of 10 nfvPPA patients high frequency rTMS over the left and right dlPFC during object and action naming tasks improved the percent of correct responses for action, but not object naming. Finally, in a sham controlled single case study, Finocchiaro et al. applied high frequency rTMS to the left inferior mid-frontal gyrus for 3 sessions consisting of five consecutive days (treatment or sham). They found a significant and lasting improvement in the patient's performance on verb production when comparing active rTMS to sham rTMS or baseline. These studies have contributed valuable insights into the potential use of rTMS in treating the language symptoms of PPA patients.

TMS is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, which can be used to change the activity of a person's brain cells without needles or surgery. In this study, the invesigators are interested in the brain's ability to adapt (also called "neuroplasticity") and regain language functioning after a stroke-specifically, they want to determine whether how a person's brain responds to TMS in the short term can be used to predict how well they will recover language abilities in the long term.

Progressive aphasia is characterized by a steady and progressive loss of language skills in the presence of relatively preserved memory, attention, and thinking. The aim of this study is to slow the progression of language decline in progressive aphasia via language therapy. The first goal of this study is to improve naming abilities of individuals with progressive aphasia. This will be accomplished by carrying out an intensive treatment program for anomia. The second goal is to evaluate whether this intense language treatment re-activates affected areas and/or connections within the language network, using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (to measure neural activity in specific brain regions) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging tractography (to measure the connectivity between specific brain regions). This is the first study on progressive aphasia addressing both treatment and imaging in the same patients.