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Speech Therapy
for a Stroke or
Other Brain Injury
Head injury, brain tumors, or other neurological causes may also result in communication challenges that can make returning to normal daily activities a challenging journey.
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Communication problems following a stroke or brain injury can vary from person to person.
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Communication problems can include aphasia, dysarthria, or apraxia of speech.
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Aphasia
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Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting speaking and understanding language and/or the ability to read or write. Aphasia symptoms vary in degrees of severity, depending on factors such as the injury's location and the size of the damage to the brain. A person with aphasia may have difficulty finding words ("anomia"). Other signs and symptoms include putting words in the wrong order, requiring extra time to process spoken messages, having difficulty writing or copying letters or words, or having difficulty reading and understanding written material. According to the National Aphasia Association, the most common cause of aphasia is stroke (about 25-40% of stroke survivors acquire aphasia). It can also result from a head injury, brain tumor, or other neurological causes.
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Dysarthria
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Dysarthria is speech that is characteristically slurred, slow, and difficult to understand. A person with dysarthria may also have problems controlling the pitch, loudness, rhythm, and voice qualities of his or her speech because there is an impairment with the mouth's muscle movements. Muscles can move too far, move in the wrong direction, move with too much or too little strength, move with poor timing, or not move to the target. The result is that speech can be challenging to understand, unnatural, and imprecise.
Dysarthria can be caused by stroke, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Myasthenia Gravis (MG), Multiple Sclerosis, cancer, and other conditions.
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Acquired Apraxia of Speech
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Acquired Apraxia of Speech occurs when messages from the brain to the mouth are disrupted due to damage to the brain's parts that control coordinated muscle movement. When a person cannot control the muscles used to form words, the lips or tongue will not make letter sounds correct. Unlike dysarthria, the strength of the mouth muscles is not affected; however, controlling and coordinating the movements is challenging in apraxia of speech. Apraxia makes it hard to initiate and sequence the sounds that make words.
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The severity of apraxia can range from mild to severe. Individuals often indicate that they know what they want to say, but they cannot say it. Someone with severe apraxia of speech may be unable to make any sounds or words at all. Individuals who have apraxia of speech may also have aphasia and dysarthria.
Apraxia of speech can be caused by stroke, traumatic brain injury (TBI), dementia, brain tumors, and progressive neurological disorders.