Augmenting Verb-Naming Therapy With Neuromodulation Decelerates Language Loss in Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) paired with the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the left inferior frontal gyrus, which was compared to VNeST paired with a sham stimulation in primary progressive aphasia (PPA).

Method: A double-blind, within-subject, sham-controlled crossover design was used. Eight participants with PPA were enrolled.

Picturing Better Materials: Normative Data on a Novel Illustration Set for Scientific and Clinical Use.

Purpose: Picture stimuli are essential materials for language research and clinical practice. Here, we generated a modern, full-color set of 310 illustrations representing a carefully designed, culturally sensitive list of imageable nouns. We normed the images in a diverse sample of healthy adults, so the images can be used in various populations, including older adults.

Resting state correlates of picture description informativeness in left vs. right hemisphere chronic stroke.

Introduction: Despite a growing emphasis on discourse processing in clinical neuroscience, relatively little is known about the neurobiology of discourse production impairments. Individuals with a history of left or right hemisphere stroke can exhibit difficulty with communicating meaningful discourse content, which implies both cerebral hemispheres play a role in this skill. However, the extent to which successful production of discourse content relies on network connections within domain-specific vs.

Corticocerebellar White Matter Integrity Is Related to Naming Outcome in Post-Stroke Aphasia.

Studies have shown that the integrity of white matter tracts connecting different regions in the left cerebral hemisphere is important for aphasia recovery after stroke. However, the impact of the underlying structural connection between the cortex and the cerebellum in post-stroke aphasia is poorly understood. We studied the microstructural integrity of the cerebellum and the corticocerebellar connections and their role in picture naming.

Resting-State Connectivity in Acute and Subacute Poststroke Aphasia: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Pilot Study.

Understanding how brain function and language skills change during early (acute and subacute) stroke phases is critical for maximizing patient recovery, yet functional neuroimaging studies of early aphasia are scarce. In this pilot study, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate how resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) in early aphasia differs from neurologically healthy adults and is related to language deficits. Twenty individuals with aphasia (12 acute and 8 subacute phase) and 15 healthy controls underwent rs-fNIRS imaging with a 46-channel montage centered over bilateral perisylvian language areas.

Digital 3D Brain MRI Arterial Territories Atlas.

The locus and extent of brain damage in the event of vascular insult can be quantitatively established quickly and easily with vascular atlases. Although highly anticipated by clinicians and clinical researchers, no digital MRI arterial atlas is readily available for automated data analyses. We created a digital arterial territory atlas based on lesion distributions in 1,298 patients with acute stroke.

Association of Regional Atrophy With Naming Decline in Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Background And Objectives: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative condition that predominantly impairs language. Most investigations of how focal atrophy affects language consider 1 time point compared with healthy controls. However, true atrophy quantification requires comparing individual brains over time.

The contribution of white matter pathology, hypoperfusion, lesion load, and stroke recurrence to language deficits following acute subcortical left hemisphere stroke.

Aphasia, the loss of language ability following damage to the brain, is among the most disabling and common consequences of stroke. Subcortical stroke, occurring in the basal ganglia, thalamus, and/or deep white matter can result in aphasia, often characterized by word fluency, motor speech output, or sentence generation impairments. The link between greater lesion volume and acute aphasia is well documented, but the independent contributions of lesion location, cortical hypoperfusion, prior stroke, and white matter degeneration (leukoaraiosis) remain unclear, particularly in subcortical aphasia.

White matter microstructural integrity pre- and post-treatment in individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia.

While previous studies have found that white matter damage relates to impairment severity in individuals with aphasia, further study is required to understand the relationship between white matter integrity and treatment response. In this study, 34 individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia underwent behavioral testing and structural magnetic resonance imaging at two timepoints. Thirty participants within this sample completed typicality-based semantic feature treatment for anomia.

Neural regions underlying object and action naming: Complementary evidence from acute stroke and primary progressive aphasia.

Background: Naming impairment is commonly noted in individuals with aphasia. However, object naming receives more attention than action naming. Furthermore, most studies include participants with aphasia due to only one aetiology, commonly stroke.

Dysfunctional Tissue Correlates of Unrelated Naming Errors in Acute Left Hemisphere Stroke.

Most naming error lesion-symptom mapping (LSM) studies have focused on semantic and/or phonological errors. Anomic individuals also produce unrelated word errors, which may be linked to semantic or modality-independent lexical deficits. To investigate the neural underpinnings of rarely-studied unrelated errors, we conducted LSM analyses in 100 individuals hospitalized with a left hemisphere stroke who completed imaging protocols and language assessments.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Paired With Verb Network Strengthening Treatment Improves Verb Naming in Primary Progressive Aphasia: A Case Series.

Purpose: There are few evidence-based treatments for language deficits in primary progressive aphasia (PPA). PPA treatments are often adopted from the poststroke aphasia literature. The poststroke aphasia literature has shown promising results using Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST), a behavioral therapy that focuses on improving naming by producing verbs and their arguments in phrases and sentences.

Dissociable language and executive control deficits and recovery in post-stroke aphasia: An exploratory observational and case series study.

A growing body of evidence indicates many, but not all, individuals with post-stroke aphasia experience executive dysfunction. Relationships between language and executive function skills are often reported in the literature, but the degree of interdependence between these abilities remains largely unanswered. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the extent to which language and executive control deficits dissociated in 1) acute stroke and 2) longitudinal aphasia recovery.

The role of disrupted functional connectivity in aphasia.

Language is one of the most complex and specialized higher cognitive processes. Brain damage to the distributed, primarily left-lateralized language network can result in aphasia, a neurologic disorder characterized by receptive and/or expressive deficits in spoken and/or written language. Most often, aphasia is the consequence of stroke-termed poststroke aphasia (PSA)-yet, aphasia can also manifest due to neurodegenerative disease, specifically, a disorder called primary progressive aphasia (PPA).

Neural correlates of syntactic comprehension: A longitudinal study.

Broca's area is frequently implicated in sentence comprehension but its specific role is debated. Most lesion studies have investigated deficits at the chronic stage. We aimed (1) to use acute imaging to predict which left hemisphere stroke patients will recover sentence comprehension; and (2) to better understand the role of Broca's area in sentence comprehension by investigating acute deficits prior to functional reorganization.

Abnormally weak functional connections get stronger in chronic stroke patients who benefit from naming therapy.

Language recovery in aphasia is likely supported by a network of brain regions, but few studies have investigated treatment-related changes in functional connectivity while controlling for the absence of treatment. We examined functional connectivity in a 38-region picture-naming network in 30 patients with chronic aphasia who did or did not receive naming therapy. Compared to healthy controls, patients had abnormally low connectivity in a subset of connections from the naming network.

Executive control deficits and lesion correlates in acute left hemisphere stroke survivors with and without aphasia.

In contrast to the traditional definition of the disorder, many individuals with aphasia exhibit non-linguistic cognitive impairments, including executive control deficits. Classic lesion studies cite frontal lobe damage in executive dysfunction, but more recent lesion symptom-mapping studies in chronic aphasia present mixed results. In this study, we compared executive control abilities of acute stroke survivors with and without aphasia and investigated lesion correlates of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive tasks.

Explicit Training to Improve Affective Prosody Recognition in Adults with Acute Right Hemisphere Stroke.

Difficulty recognizing affective prosody (receptive aprosodia) can occur following right hemisphere damage (RHD). Not all individuals spontaneously recover their ability to recognize affective prosody, warranting behavioral intervention. However, there is a dearth of evidence-based receptive aprosodia treatment research in this clinical population.

Stroke Recurrence and Its Relationship With Language Abilities.

Purpose Many factors influence poststroke language recovery, yet little is known about the influence of previous stroke(s) on language after left hemisphere stroke. In this prospective longitudinal study, we investigated the role of prior stroke on language abilities following an acute left hemisphere ischemic stroke, while controlling for demographic and stroke-related factors, and examined if earlier stroke impacted language recovery at a chronic time point. Method Participants ( = 122) with acute left hemisphere ischemic stroke completed language evaluation and clinical neuroimaging.

Characterizing subtypes and neural correlates of receptive aprosodia in acute right hemisphere stroke.

Introduction: Speakers naturally produce prosodic variations depending on their emotional state. Receptive prosody has several processing stages. We aimed to conduct lesion-symptom mapping to determine whether damage (core infarct or hypoperfusion) to specific brain areas was associated with receptive aprosodia or with impairment at different processing stages in individuals with acute right hemisphere stroke.

Thalamic Nuclei and Thalamocortical Pathways After Left Hemispheric Stroke and Their Association with Picture Naming.

Previous studies utilized lesion-centric approaches to study the role of the thalamus in language. In this study, we tested the hypotheses that non-lesioned dorsomedial and ventral anterior nuclei (DMVAC) and pulvinar lateral posterior nuclei complexes (PLC) of the thalamus and their projections to the left hemisphere show secondary effects of the strokes, and that their microstructural integrity is closely related to language-related functions. Subjects with language impairments after a left-hemispheric cortical and/or subcortical, early stroke ( = 31, ≤6 months) or late stroke ( = 30, ≥12 months) sparing thalamus underwent the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

Naming errors and dysfunctional tissue metrics predict language recovery after acute left hemisphere stroke.

Language recovery following acute left hemisphere (LH) stroke is notoriously difficult to predict. Global language measures (e.g.

White Matter Hyperintensities Contribute to Language Deficits in Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Objective: To determine the contribution of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) to language deficits while accounting for cortical atrophy in individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA).

Method: Forty-three individuals with PPA completed neuropsychological assessments of nonverbal semantics, naming, and sentence repetition plus T2-weighted and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery scans. Using three visual scales, we rated WMH and cerebral ventricle size for both scan types.

The role of microstructural integrity of major language pathways in narrative speech in the first year after stroke.

Background And Purpose: Left hemisphere stroke often results in a variety of language deficits due to varying patterns of damage to language networks. The Cookie Theft picture description task, a classic, quick bedside assessment, has been shown to quantify narrative speech reliably. In this study, we utilized diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to assess language network white matter tract correlates of lexical-semantic and syntactic impairments longitudinally.

Pre-treatment graph measures of a functional semantic network are associated with naming therapy outcomes in chronic aphasia.

Naming treatment outcomes in post-stroke aphasia are variable and the factors underlying this variability are incompletely understood. In this study, 26 patients with chronic aphasia completed a semantic judgment fMRI task before receiving up to 12 weeks of naming treatment. Global (i.