Active clinical trials for "Aphasia"

The currently available interventions only partially restore language abilities in patients with post-stroke aphasia; preventing successful reintegration into society. This study will increase our knowledge of how we can use assistive technology interventions to help people with aphasia restore language function. Further, this project will help us identify regions of the brain responsible for these changes.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the feasibility of using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) - a form of non-invasive brain stimulation - to improve language functioning in individuals who have the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA-L) - a slowly progressive impairment of language, characterized by difficulties with word-finding, sentence repetition and sentence comprehension.

The current planned study is a prospective randomized double-blind, sham-controlled, two parallel-groups, polycentric, phase-I superiority type of trial. Right-handed native Arabic-speaking patients with chronic aphasia post-stroke will be recruited from multiple in and outpatient rehabilitation centers in Saudi Arabia. All participants with aphasia that exceeds at least six months post onset with deficits in naming skills due to ischemic lesion or haemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere will be included. All participants will complete three consecutive phases: (i) baseline assessment, (ii) interventions (Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) with real tDCS or sham tDCS, and (iii) outcome testing (GACAT test). The primary hypothesis predicts improvement in naming ability (object naming and action verb naming) and word fluency by combining SLT with anodal-tDCS (intervention group) compared to SLT combined with sham-tDCS (control group). Primary endpoint will be a 6-month follow-up, at which will be expected to show the effects of improvement in the language impairments. The secondary hypothesis predicts that anodal-tDCS will yield beneficial results in secondary outcomes measures compared to sham-tDCS. Secondary endpoint will be immediately post-treatment and a 12-month follow-up, and it will examine the consistency effect of long-term outcomes.

This Phase II study aims to ascertain the effectiveness of HD-tDCS for adjunctive treatment of anomia in chronic aphasia post stroke. Furthermore, it will help explore factors such as alternate outcome measures, subject selection criteria, and benefits of extended treatment duration. These results will be compared to an existing trial using conventional non-targeted tDCS with the same design and outcomes. Patients will be treated with HD-tDCS while performing computerized anomia treatment. The basis behind this method is that language therapy is mediated by cortical areas that are most effectively activated during the training tasks, thus increasing electric stimulation in these areas may improve learning outcomes. To better understand the long term benefits of the adjunctive treatment, patients will be screened again four weeks and six months after study using the same anomia tests. If HD-tDCS shows promising results in increasing the learning outcomes of anomia treatment, a Phase III trial can be considered.

The substantial efficacy and the possible mechanism of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) improving language recovery remained unclear. It is hypothesized that the rTMS was associated with increased synaptic connection and neural regeneration which can be evaluated via functional neuroimage and neurofiber imaging analysis. The effect of rTMS intervention was monitored by clinical testing and neuroimaging study.

The study aims to identify if intensive language training, consisting mainly of computer-based object naming, together with electrical brain stimulation, will lead to an improvement of language functions in patients that suffer from language disturbances after a stroke.

A stroke located in the left parieto-temporal junction is associated, in aphasic right-handed patients, with a poor prognosis for language recovery. The role of the right hemisphere in recovering post-stroke aphasia is still controversial. Our hypothesis, based on recent work in imaging, is that early activation of the right hemisphere linked to the practice of the visual arts could facilitate language recovery in extended posterior left strokes that completely disrupt language areas.

The DULCINEA study aims to develop and validate a new therapy that integrates essential language characteristics and functional communication by dubbing scenes from television series that represent daily situations. It will be a randomized, crossed over, interventional pilot study recruiting 54 patients with poststroke nonfluent aphasia. Patients will be treated individually in 40-minute sessions twice a week for 8 weeks. In each session, a speech therapist and an actor will select the clips with muted words or sentences that have been detected as functionally meaningful for each patient. Outcomes will be assessed as significant differences in two aphasia tests.

Up to now there is proven evidence of traditional logopedic therapy in aphasia, but recent computer-based algorithms also showed their evidence so far. Due to small and heterogenous study populations further trials are urgently needed. This prospective, randomized, clinical & experimental controlled noninvasive study is intended to provide data for the therapy of an individual approach in aphasia patients.

This study will establish factors fundamental to the improvement in communication and quality of life for people with dementia known as primary progressive aphasia (PPA). PPA is a type of dementia in which language declines but other cognitive skills (including memory) are preserved in the first several years after the onset. This makes those in the initial stages of PPA excellent candidates for treatment and creates a window of time (2-7 years) whereby they can lead independent lives with minimal support. However, currently, no communication therapy is available to people with PPA due to the progressive nature of the disorder and lack of awareness of available options for professionals willing to treat it. Participants with PPA in our study will receive two kinds of therapy for the words they cannot recall spontaneously, and will be trained to maintain them through social interaction. The type of training will be based on the most successful interventions the investigators provided to people with PPA in our previous work. The investigators expect that successful re-learning of forgotten words and practicing them in a group setting will facilitate retention of communication skills leading to greater personal independence and increased/maintained quality of life for people with PPA. Our study represents natural combination of two novel approaches for PPA that ultimately will lead to lower demands on the health care system.