Abstract
the objective of this paper is to verify the effect of speech therapy intervention program in patients with non-fluent aphasia due to stroke in language tasks related to verbal fluency in semantic and phonological categories. Patients with aphasia due to stroke were selected to take part in this study. Two groups were formed: diagnosed patients with Broca/transcortical motor aphasia (GA), and a control group (healthy individuals). GA took a fluency verbal task (FAS, other complementary categories: phonological /p/ /l/ and semantic: "fruits" and "names"). These patients were all engaged in a language intervention program developed by the authors of this study. GA received speech therapy sessions (ten sessions lasting for an hour once a week), following a specific language program. After the sessions, the patients were re-evaluated. GA had statistical significant improvement in the verbal fluency task after the speech therapy program (p-value < 0,001). The speech language therapy program we proposed was efficient enough to show improvement in the results for GA in the verbal fluency task.
Highlights
Stroke is the second leading cause of death in the world, a major cause of disability and hospitalizations around the globe[1,2]
Data were collected for the control group from 60 healthy adult participants, with varying levels of education, minimum education of complete elementary school, 42 women (70%) and 18 men (30%), aged between 18 and 90 years
The difference in performance before and after speech therapy intervention can be seen in the graph (Figure 1). We found that this sample included patients who had a stroke with 1.1 to 9.1 years of injury, with an average of 4.8 years of injury
Summary
Stroke (cerebrovascular accident - CVA) is the second leading cause of death in the world, a major cause of disability and hospitalizations around the globe[1,2]. Stroke can cause several sequelae, among which the individual’s language and communicative capacity can be frequently affected, characterizing aphasia[3,4]. The verbal fluency test is widely used to assess language changes in aphasias, as it verifies the linguistic production that needs a start up of several cognitive mechanisms, such as processing speed and attention, and is widely used to verify the semantic memory[8,9]. This test proved to be sensitive to check for language changes in several pathologies, including lesions in the frontal and temporal lobe [8,9-10,11]
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