One goal of the Healthy People 2010 program is to reduce health disparities across different segments of the population. Diagnosis and treatment of language deficits in patients with chronic aphasia is one area where disparities continue to exist even though this topic is of great theoretical and clinical significance. The current research on this topic, however, lacks specific recommendations on what language therapies have the potential to facilitate maximal language recovery in individuals with stroke and more importantly, the neural mechanisms that underlie such plasticity changes. This grant proposal extends the PI's previous work in monolingual aphasia rehabilitation to utilizing advanced functional neuroimaging techniques to better understand the mechanisms involved in language recovery in patients who receive theoretically motivated language therapy.
The aim of this K18 mentored grant proposal is for the candidate to learn (a) detailed structural lesion analysis techniques, (b) state of the art fMRI data analysis techniques specific to stroke populations, and (c) MEG/EEG experimentation and analysis methods to examine effective connectivity changes subsequent to rehabilitation. These techniques will be implemented in a small scale project involving ten patients with aphasia who will participate in a ten week structured naming therapy program and will undergo pre and post therapy structural T1, functional MRI, and MEG/EEG experiments. At the end of this project, the candidate will be successful at utilizing an integrated set of tools that will ultimately allow a detailed, anatomically grounded characterization of the psycholinguistic, structural and functional basis of language recovery in chronic stroke survivors. The proposed work is also clinically important because it has the potential to define future health care practice in chronic stroke management.

Public Health Relevance

This training plan will integrate three complementary advanced neuroimaging techniques to examine the effect of language therapy on language recovery in individuals with post stroke aphasia who have naming deficits. The proposed work is important because it has the potential to define future health care practice in chronic stroke management. Better therapies will be developed if we understand how the brain is capable of recovering subsequent to a stroke and conversely, we will be able to characterize brain plasticity mechanism more reliably if we are confident about the effectiveness of therapies that can improve language recovery in individuals with chronic aphasia.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
The Career Enhancement Award (K18)
Project #
1K18DC011517-01
Application #
8089918
Study Section
Communication Disorders Review Committee (CDRC)
Program Officer
Sklare, Dan
Project Start
2011-07-01
Project End
2013-06-30
Budget Start
2011-07-01
Budget End
2012-06-30
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2011
Total Cost
$125,102
Indirect Cost
Name
Boston University
Department
Other Health Professions
Type
Schools of Allied Health Profes
DUNS #
049435266
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02215
Meier, Erin L; Johnson, Jeffrey P; Villard, Sarah et al. (2017) Does Naming Therapy Make Ordering in a Restaurant Easier? Dynamics of Co-Occurring Change in Cognitive-Linguistic and Functional Communication Skills in Aphasia. Am J Speech Lang Pathol 26:266-280
Meier, Erin L; Lo, Melody; Kiran, Swathi (2016) Understanding semantic and phonological processing deficits in adults with aphasia: Effects of category and typicality. Aphasiology 30:719-749
Sims, Jordyn A; Kapse, Kushal; Glynn, Peter et al. (2016) The relationships between the amount of spared tissue, percent signal change, and accuracy in semantic processing in aphasia. Neuropsychologia 84:113-26
Vallila-Rohter, Sofia; Kiran, Swathi (2015) An Examination of Strategy Implementation During Abstract Nonlinguistic Category Learning in Aphasia. J Speech Lang Hear Res 58:1195-209
Kiran, Swathi; Meier, Erin L; Kapse, Kushal J et al. (2015) Changes in task-based effective connectivity in language networks following rehabilitation in post-stroke patients with aphasia. Front Hum Neurosci 9:316
Meinzer, Marcus; Beeson, PĂ©lagie M; Cappa, Stefano et al. (2013) Neuroimaging in aphasia treatment research: consensus and practical guidelines for data analysis. Neuroimage 73:215-24
Kiran, Swathi; Ansaldo, Ana; Bastiaanse, Roelien et al. (2013) Neuroimaging in aphasia treatment research: standards for establishing the effects of treatment. Neuroimage 76:428-35
Kiran, Swathi (2012) What is the nature of poststroke language recovery and reorganization? ISRN Neurol 2012:786872