Active clinical trials for "Aphasia"

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.

The study investigates the possibility that levetiracetam may improve the symptoms of chronic post-stroke aphasia.

The study is designed to assess the demographic, clinical and imaging associations with the presence of microbleeds in atypical Alzheimer's disease. The primary hypothesis is that cognitive and functional performance will be poorer in atypical Alzheimer's subjects with microbleeds compared to those without microbleeds.

The integrity of structural connectivity supporting cortical regions in the left brain hemisphere is hypothesized to enable treatment-induced naming recovery in persons with language difficulties after a stroke (aphasia). The investigators will map whole brain connectivity (i.e., the brain connectome) to investigate the role of cortical connectivity in impairment (Aim 1) and recovery (Aim 2) in patients with aphasia undergoing treatment. This information will be used to construct personalized markers of anomia treatment outcome (Aim 3), which may serve as a guide for speech-language pathologists and neurologists when facing patient management decisions.

This study aims to evaluate, in communication tasks, the pragmatic effectiveness of the communication book in the general conditions of use and its maintenance in the implementation of the compensatory strategies of communication in severe aphasias.

Aphasia is a devastating acquired language impairment mainly caused by stroke, in which anomia is a quintessential clinical feature. If speech-language therapy (SLT) has been shown to be effective for persons with aphasia, the relative efficiency of one SLT strategy over another remains a matter of debate. The influential relationship between language, executive functions and aphasia rehabilitation outcomes has been addressed in a number of studies, but only few of them have studied the effect of adding an executive training to linguistic therapies.The aim of this study is to measure the efficiency of a protocol combining anomia therapy and executive training on naming skills and discourse in post-stroke aphasic persons at the chronic stage

Logbooks are one of the most commonly used methods to both support and track adherence in research studies. This study will look at using logbooks to support adherence to reading practice for individuals with post-stroke aphasia. It is thought that using a logbook will increase practice time.

The purpose of this research is to utilize functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain reorganization for language behavior in stroke patients with aphasia. A primary focus of the study is on recovery of nonfluent propositional speech and naming in chronic aphasia patients. The fMRI technique is used to examine activation in the left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH), during recovery of specific language behaviors in chronic nonfluent aphasia patients.

The investigators will run an at-home usability study of a newly developed speech therapy app called Speech Hero with 10 individuals with Broca's aphasia in the chronic stage of stroke. The Speech Hero app allows users to perform rhythm-based speech exercises at home. For this study participants will be instructed to use Speech Hero for at least 10 hours over a 4-week period.

The purpose of this study is to study, among the aphasic person, if motor function ( studied by Motor Evoked Potentials) performed within the first 14 days after a stroke can predict a good recovery from aphasia 6 months of the initial episode.