Aphasia in the World of Post Strokes

Aphasia

In the world of post strokes or major brain injury there are many difficulties to overcome. One such difficulty is aphasia. The most common way to treat aphasia is through speech therapy, by using various techniques with picture images to repeat words. This gives the patients the ability to remember the words that they learned. However there is a newer treatment, Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). This treatment has better results than the traditional therapy. The article, "From Singing to Speaking: Why Singing may Lead to Recovery of Expressive Language Function in Patients with Brocas's Aphasia" by Schlaug, Marchina, Norton (Schlaug, 2008), tries to prove that MIT works better on Patients with Broca's Aphasia.

Aphasia is a condition which is an inability to communicate or understand through language, which is either through speech, reading, writing, or listening. Aphasia is caused by brain injury usually to the left hemisphere of the brain where most of the language and communication from the brain comes from. However, some damages are in the right side where there are additional language and communication activity coming from the right hemisphere. The brain injury is usually caused do to deprived oxygen to the brain during strokes, injury due to impact of accident like car accidents and the like infection to the brain, or tumors that damages the brain.

There are three broad types of aphasia namely fluent, non-fluent, and global. Global aphasia affects all parts of the brain that have anything to do with language and communication. In this case of aphasia people have server difficulties in all sorts of communication.

Another case of aphasia is fluent aphasia which is commonly known as Wernick's Aphasia, is damages to the temporal lobe on the left side of the brain. With fluent aphasia people will speak long sentences with words that have no meanings and have no comprehension of spoken language. They will even make up their own words that sound like gibberish, as a result; it is often difficult to understand them. These individuals usually are unaware of their illness and how they sound.

Third type of aphasia is non-fluent aphasia, commonly known as Broca's aphasia results from damages to the left side front portion or frontal lobe of the language-dominant area of the brain. People with Broca's or can't speak at all or just say single words, like phone, which could mean please bring me the phone. If they speak more the one word to make up a sentence, it comes with great difficulty and they cannot use any conjunction words like a, the, and, but, and/or etc. These people can sing words nicely but have a difficulty saying them. Unlike Wernike's aphasia, individuals with Broca's aphasia may become frustrated and depressed because they are aware of their language difficulties.

Treatment for aphasia is mostly done through speech therapy. There are no medical or surgical procedures currently available to treat this condition. The traditional therapies commonly use various tactics by using a mixture of images to enable the patient to repeat words that they are trying to learn and remember. However, there is a newer type of treatment called Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). In the past few decades it was found that MIT works more efficiently, than the traditional therapies, for patients diagnosed with Brocas aphasia. In this article, by Schlaug, Marchina, and Norton (Schlaug, 2008), it is discussed what MIT is and what other studies have tried to confirm and why they did not prove much about MIT. The article then discuss about a study that the authors did to try to show that MIT works better than the other therapies. It also shows which area of the brain the therapy improves the language capabilities in the brain.

Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) is used to heal and cure people with brocas aphasia. Traditional therapy they work by using repetitive speech like using flash cards. It cures people by using the power of music, which focuses on the right side of the brain. The author explains that MIT is hierarchically structure treatment which consists of three levels and each level has two pitches. This treatment starts at a lower level and through tot the therapy they build up on the levels to reach the higher level. The lower level is simple sentence such as I love you to a higher level using more complex sentence.