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A miracle of neuroscience: How does language ability suffer after brain injury?
Language is a vital tool in daily life. However, for some people, this simple method of communication becomes extremely difficult due to brain injury. Aphasia, an impairment in the ability to understand or express language, is caused by damage to specific brain areas. The condition is most common after a stroke or head trauma, and its current incidence in developed countries is estimated to be between 0.1% and 0.4%.
Symptoms of aphasia may range from occasional inability to find words to complete loss of the ability to speak, read, or write.
The incidence of aphasia is related to many factors, including the degree, extent and location of the brain injury. In addition to stroke, brain tumors, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia can also cause aphasia. The language skills of these patients may deteriorate significantly in the short term, affecting their ability to express and understand spoken and written language.
Manifestations of aphasia
Symptoms and signs of aphasia vary depending on the location of the individual's brain damage. Symptoms may include an inability to name objects, reduced verbal fluency, and long sentences of unclear meaning. For example, when asked "What is this?" the patient may only be able to say "It is something to write on."
Difficulties experienced by people with aphasia can sometimes be caused by self-correction and efforts to speak. The occurrence of this situation shows effort and frustration.
The impact of cognitive impairment
People with aphasia also often exhibit cognitive deficits unrelated to language that may affect areas such as attention, memory, and executive functioning. This makes treating the condition more complicated. For some patients, these cognitive impairments may be the underlying cause of speech loss. In the process of rebuilding language abilities, the impact of these cognitive deficits cannot be ignored.
The degree of cognitive impairment is closely related to the quality of life of patients with aphasia, and some studies even show that its impact may exceed the severity of language deficits.
Causes of aphasia
The most common cause of aphasia is stroke, and about one-quarter of acute stroke patients develop aphasia after the attack. By exploring brain imaging tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the medical community can gain a clearer understanding of the extent of brain damage and its impact on language ability.
Treatment and Rehabilitation
For the treatment of aphasia, speech therapy is one of the main interventions. Through continued rehabilitation, many patients are able to gradually improve their speech skills. Some emerging treatments, including interventions that target cognitive deficits, may help improve patients' overall expressiveness and cognitive function.
Research shows that the results of language recovery are largely related to the improvement of cognitive deficits, which makes treatment design more sophisticated and effective.
Classification of aphasia
Aphasia can be divided into various subtypes, such as fluent aphasia and non-fluent aphasia. People with fluent aphasia have fluent speech, but their speech content lacks meaning, while people with non-fluent aphasia have difficulty expressing themselves and may be able to produce only short sentences. Although this classification is convenient, it may not be accurate enough for different individual circumstances.
With the deepening of research on aphasia, the medical community has begun to realize that aphasia is not a single symptom, but a complex group of language disorders, which also challenges the existing classification model.
Faced with the impact on language ability, how can we better understand and help patients with aphasia adapt to this new reality?
