Title:Overcoming aphasia after stroke

For many people, one of the most devastating consequences of suffering a stroke is impaired ability to speak, understand words, read, and write. Aphasia occurs in patients whose strokes occur in the left hemisphere of their brains, the side that houses the areas crucial for developing and processing language.

A new NIH-funded study led by Georgetown University Medical Center researchers, published Sept. 8 in the journal Brain, deepens understanding of the role that the right side of the brain can potentially play in helping these patients recover their ability to relearn language and communicate.

The study, one of largest and most thorough to address this issue, used advanced neuroimaging techniques to compare right brain activity in stroke patients with a control group of healthy adults. The researchers found that specific areas of the right brain are activated in the stroke patients as their brains attempt to compensate for damage to the left hemisphere.

Peter Turkeltaub, professor of neurology and rehabilitation medicine and director of the GUMC’s Cognitive Recovery Lab, and his colleagues plan to conduct a longer study designed to look at right hemisphere activity and its role in stroke recovery over a period of years. They will also test which specific language abilities the right hemisphere supports after stroke so that future trials can pair methods to boost right hemisphere activity with the most effective speech-language therapies.