Intensive therapy, even four years later, improves stroke victims speech

A new study suggests that when intensive therapy is used with people who suffered a stroke years earlier, their speaking ability seems to improve.

The relatively small study offers hope to stroke victims and their families and although the experiment needs to be duplicated with a larger, broader group, several experts praised the results.

The researchers looked at 27 stroke survivors, 16 men and 11 women with an average age of 51, who had suffered, after a stroke, from varying degrees of aphasia, for about four years.

Approximately 700,000 people each year experience a new or recurrent stroke in the United States. Signs of a stroke include a sudden loss of vision in one or both eyes, sudden loss of strength or sensation on one side of the body and slurred speech or a change in language.

The study participants were given 30 hours of speech training, three hours a day over a period of 10 days. Before the training, the patients had trouble finding the right words or understanding what other people said. An immediate improvment was seen after the training and that progress was maintained six months later.

In the study the therapists used games to encourage patients to speak rather than relying on gestures to communicate and players had to ask for cards that matched the images on cards given to them. The card game used increasingly complex items and required patients to increase the complexity of their speech, and also tested language functions like naming, repeating words and sentences, comprehension and written language.

Marcus Meinzer of the Unversitat Konstanz, Germany, lead author of the study says that that about 38 percent of stroke survivors have aphasia after a stroke on the left side of the brain, and while there is often a spontaneous improvement in patients during the first six months after a stroke, as many as 60 percent still have problems speaking six months later.

Fifteen of the patients were also given additional therapy including reinforcement by family members at home and they were sent out into real-life situations with family members in which they had tasks such asking for information.

Researchers found that language skills improved in 85 percent of the patients, and in the second group the improvements were even more pronounced. Patients and relatives in both groups saw an increase in quality of everyday communication following the training.

The study is published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.