Health professionals

We are contacting our participants’ speech and language therapists to ask them to complete our Therapy Questionnaire.

The questionnaire asks about several aspects of therapy, including: (1) the amount, frequency and timing of therapy, (2) any factors which may affect the provision of therapy (e.g. participant health, service demands), and (3) what participant factors enhance or impede that participant’s response to therapy (e.g. fatigue, mental and/or physical ill-health, motivation level).

This information, along with information from participants about their everyday language use, will build a detailed picture of the amount and type of language input that PLORAS participants receive.

The therapy and language use data will be integrated with other participant data collected for PLORAS (including brain scans, demographics, language assessments, and patient-reported outcomes).

We will then investigate whether different patients experience different benefits from therapy and language practice, depending on their stroke characteristics (e.g. size and location in the brain) or their personal characteristics (e.g. their age).

Find out more…

Background

  • Speech and language therapy is effective for improving communication following aphasia.
  • However, there is not enough information about:
    • why some patients respond better to therapy than others;
    • which types of therapy are most effective for individual patient profiles[1]
  • We think that the location and extent of damage in the brain may determine who responds well, and who responds less well to impairment-based speech and language therapy. For example, patients with damage to brain regions that are critical for language processing may have reduced capacity for impairment recovery. Patients who spared these regions have greater capacity for impairment recovery.

Our approach

By analysing a wide range of data from hundreds of patients with aphasia, we will find out more about how stroke and patient factors interact with clinically-provided therapy.

How this will benefit therapists and patients

We hope that what we learn can provide future therapists with information to tailor their therapy provision, based on each individual patient’s characteristics, in addition to the patient’s goals.

[1] Fridriksson J, Hillis AE. Current Approaches to the Treatment of Post-Stroke Aphasia. doi: 10.5853/jos.2020.05015