Traumatic Brain Injury Paper

Neurological injuries can manifest themselves in endless ways across a wide spectrum of physical, emotional, and developmental deficits. Within just one of these manifestations, aphasia, there is a wide range of variation based on the location and level of damage from a neurological injury. Aphasia encapsulates a spectrum of deficits. It is defined as a disorder of language acquired secondary to brain damage (ASHA). These disorders can manifest themselves as receptive, damaging to the ability to process speech, expressive, damaging to the ability to produce speech, or both. In most right-handed and some left-handed patients, aphasia results from a lesion in the left hemisphere (ASHA). I strongly believe that a comprehensive knowledge of aphasias

Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language. For most people, these are parts of the left side (hemisphere) of the brain. Aphasia usually occurs suddenly, often as the result of a stroke or head injury, but it may also develop slowly, as in the case of a brain tumor. The disorder impairs the expression and understanding of language as well as reading and writing. “Aphasia may co-occur with speech disorders such as dysarthria or apraxia of speech, which also result from brain damage”. (Sarno 23)

In my interview, Michelle described Lisa’s features of Aphasia that were similar to existing studies done on stroke victims that also suffer from aphasia. Symptoms of her language disorder were more prominent during the first year after her stroke, but through intensive therapies she has benefited in her communication abilities. Michelle explains that right after the stroke, her daughter suffered from a period of not speaking at all. She experienced mild paralyzation in the right side of her body and had great difficulties swallowing. After a few weeks, her swallowing ability recovered on its own, and she started speaking again but could not put together a whole sentence. Lisa admits the struggle to find her words was the most frustrating part,

A sample of spontaneous speech was obtained through the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination and by asking patients to talk about their last holiday. Speech was analyzed including number of words produced per minute, number of speech production errors per minute, length of word-finding pauses, and range of nouns and verbs used.

According to the NINDS, damage to a specific portion of the brain that is responsible for language is known as aphasia, which is a neurological disorder. This disorder includes difficulty in reading and writing, not able to express oneself when speaking, and trouble understanding speech (NINDS, par.1). There are three different types of aphasia, and they depend on the portion of the brain that has been affected such as: Wernicke, Broca, and Global

In general, aphasia is the impairment of language functions due to localized brain damage. The three types of aphasia include Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, and conduction aphasia. Broca’s aphasia involves reduced amounts, distorted articulation, and slow effortful speech. Wernicke’s aphasia involves a person being able to produce fluent speech, but if often difficult to make sense of. Conduction aphasia involves mispronouncing words, disrupted speech due to pauses and hesitations, and problems with repeating words said by someone else.

Aphasia may affect expressive language by causing difficulty with finding the correct words to use in conversation. People who have expressive problems may still be able to express their thoughts by using circumlocution. Receptive language may also be affected by limiting a person’s ability to interpret the sounds that they hear, including their own voice. Reading may be affected through the person being unable to interpret all the symbols they see. Aphasia may also affect writing by making it difficult to put words together to form sentences and lead to spelling and grammatical

The patient who I was observing showed many Brocha’s Aphasia characteristics like trouble reading, frustration, lots of frustration, trouble spelling, and the inability to form words. During therapy they targeted many things. There were some activities done to help improves the retrieving of words. The patient had to explain an object using words. This proved hard for the patient, they had trouble trying to explain the word and they got frustrated. To help with the struggling the therapist would often help improve access to the words by phonemic cueing. When the patient would be trying to say a word, but cannot say the word the therapist would say the first sound of the word like. This helped the patient a lot, but they were still having trouble. So, the therapist wrote down words, some of them had to do with the main words some didn’t. This helped the patient a lot even though they still struggled, which triggered frustration. When frustration accrued the therapist would always try to change the subject or try a calming activity. The calming activity consisted of music being played, and the patient had to focus on her breathing. This helped relax the patient and the frustration seemed to go away. The therapy sessions seemed to be really helping the patient with their aphasia.

Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to the part of the brain that control speech. Aphasia is often caused by strokes, however, any damage to the part of the brain that control speech can cause aphasia like tumors or any traumatic brain injury. When referring to aphasia we can mentioned a couple of different aphasias. Anomic Aphasia is a type of aphasia where an individual has consistent inability to produce words for things that they want to talk about. Usually anomia aphasia is seen in all the different types of aphasias. Anomia is caused by damage to various part of the parietal lobe or the temporal lobe of the brain which is now the main target of research for those studying any type of aphasia. The severity and the specific symptoms of the aphasia depends on the localization of the brain damage.

One of the rarest types of aphasia includes Transcortical Sensory Aphasia (TSA) and Transcortical Motor Aphasia (TMA), which also has minimum amount of research, compared to other types of speech disorders. Patients with Transcortical Sensory and Motor Aphasias are most similar to Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia but differ by their repetition skills. Differentiating features including salient features, neurological relation, speech, voice, and/ or swallowing deficits, assessments, and current SLP treatments set these two Aphasias apart from other speech disorders.

Aphasia is a disorder that causes damage to several parts of the brain that are responsible for language, it gets in the way of a person’s capability to comprehend words. The area of the brain that is responsible of language is the left side of the brain. Aphasia usually occurs when someone gets a stroke or a serious head injury, but it may also develop slowly by the cause of a brain tumor, dementia or an infection, Aphasia impairs the expression and understanding of language and it also affects reading and writing. It may occur with speech disorders as well such as dysarthria or apraxia of speech, which is also caused from brain damage. The causes of aphasia are damages to one or more areas of language in the brain, or sometimes brain injury

Often times people are affected by brain damage, which include symptoms of shortened attention span, inability to sense time and paralysis. One of these symptoms can also be aphasia, which is the inability to interact using spoken, written, or sign language. The majority of people affected with this neurological disorder experience difficulty in basic tasks, such as reading and writing. 10 Although thousands are affected in various ways, there are currently several channels of treatment administered by medical professionals. Through the use of improving technology, medical professionals are better understanding the disorder, allowing them to develop better treatment practices.

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative disease in which early symptoms are characterized by gradual disturbances of the language function while other cognitive functions remain preserved. These deficits of the language function tend to worsen over time and vary between patients. Three cardinal aphasic variants have been identified in PPA and designated as nonfluent (nfvPPA), semantic (svPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA), each with a characteristic pattern of atrophy and underlying pathology.

Estabrooks, N., & Albert, M. (2014). Manual of aphasia and aphasia therapy (3rd ed.). Austin, Texas: PRO-ED.

83). He was unable to read big numbers. He could recognize, even understand isolated words, but when they come together in a sentence, Johnson would have difficulty dealing. His impaired short term memory could not hold the thought of a sentence long enough for him to achieve understanding. He acknowledged not being aphasic but did experience stuttering, voice tremors, and slurred his words (Johnson, 1990, pp. 18, 50, 112, 120). He said, he saw the words he wanted to say, but had difficulty bringing out those words verbally. It is inevitable for speech-language pathologists to work with stroke patients because the condition causes damages to any part of the brain or brain stem and it is these damages that lead to neurogenic communication disorders, as well as cognitive deficits (Manasco, 2014, p. 68). We recall that neurogenic communication disorders are communication difficulties or disturbances that are brought about by damaged in the brain and other parts of the nervous system (Manasco, 2014, p. 3). This range of disorders includes aphasia, dysarthria, and apraxia of speech, right hemisphere disorders, dementia, and many other accompanying deficits that negatively affect the patient's ability to