Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new treatment which can substantially improve speech and word production in patients with stroke experiencing aphasia. The study which was funded by Medical Research Council, the Rosetrees Trust and the European Research Council and its findings were published in the journal Brain.
The research team comprising a speech therapist and cognitive neuroscientists developed a technology that utilises special software to assist patients in producing words at an increasingly quicker rate.
20 patients with stroke underwent testing for the new treatment. Over the course of multiple sessions, patients were shown pictures on a laptop and initially given 3 seconds to react. The reaction time was slowly decreased with the goal of attaining a 1-second response time, normal for individuals aged >65 years.
To validate the intervention, it was compared with the standard speech therapy treatment using 3 measures. The accuracy of word retrieval had a 25% improvement with the new treatment vs 10% with standard treatment. Appropriate use of words in speech was increased from 17% to 59% with the new treatment vs 14% to 33% with standard treatment. The new treatment showed an improvement in speed of response from 3 seconds to 1.6 seconds vs 3 seconds to 2 seconds with standard treatment.
According to Professor Matthew Lambon Ralph, a cognitive neuroscientist, the novel approach is cheap, quick to administer and more effective than current treatments. The current findings provide a valid proof of principle which supports further assessment with a larger scale multi-centre trial.
