Aphasia, a language disorder, is the inability to understand and/or create language. This is the result of damage to the brain. It is hard to locate where exactly in the brain that causes aphasia. Aphasia can negatively affect speaking, listening, reading, and writing. There are different deficits that can result from aphasia. Those deficits are expressive and language comprehension deficits. Patients with an expressive deficit most likely will reduce their vocabulary by adding or deleting words from complete sentences. They may also substitute words and have delayed speech production. Aphasia generally affects a wide range of Americas population. According to (Owens, 2014), “1 million Americans have aphasia. More than 200 individuals-primarily adults-acquire aphasia in the United States each day” (p. 144). Other disorders can go hand and hand with Aphasia. Apraxia and dysarthria are other neurogenic disorders, which affects the central nervous system (Owens, 2014). Depression and seizures can also result from aphasia due to it being a neurological disorder. Aphasia is most likely to occur in those who haven’t been previously affected by speech or language deficits. One of the main causes of Aphasia can result from clients who have previously had a stroke. About 100,000 patients with aphasia have acquired it from them previously having a stroke. There was a study conducted where 50 participants that acquired aphasia after a stroke were asked to recall information about medical information they received. Most of the participants weren’t able to recall that information, even claiming they were never told or had no idea what aphasia was. Participants who didn’t have aphasia, but just had a stroke were more likely to recall medical information (Rose, 2009).
There are different types of aphasia a patient can have. Two subcategories of aphasia are fluent and nonfluent. Fluent aphasia normally affects the left hemisphere of the brain more towards the back of the head. Fluent aphasia is when the patient is able to rapidly produce sentences fluently, but unable to comprehend what others are saying to the them or engaging in conversation with others. Different types of fluent aphasia are wernicke’s, anomic, conduction, and transcortical sensory. Wernicke’s aphasia means the client has impaired speech comprehension, reading comprehension, naming, and speech repetition. In anomic aphasia, speech comprehension is mildly impaired, and naming is severely impaired (Owens, 2014). Conduction aphasia has mildly impaired speech comprehension, impaired naming, and poo speech repetition. Lastly, clients with transcortical sensory have poor speech comprehension, reading comprehension, and naming. Nonfluent aphasia is when the client has the ability to understand or comprehend what is going on, but has trouble producing what they want to say. For example, my grandmother has aphasia and she describes it as knowing what she wants to say, but unable to actually say it. Nonfluent aphasia affects the frontal lobe of the brain. Different types of nonfluent aphasia are broca’s, transcortical, and global. Broca’s aphasia can affect reading comprehension, naming, and speech repetition negatively. With transcoritcal aphasia, speech comprehension is mildly impaired, reading comprehension can be poor, and naming is impaired. The last nonfluent aphasia is global aphasia. Global aphasia has poor speech comprehension, reading comprehension, naming, and speech repetition (Owens, 2014). Typically, any types of aphasia can be caused due to damage of the brain, such as a head injury, tumor, or infection. Some common signs and symptoms that help identify whether the client has aphasia is by looking at their communication. Usually those with aphasia don’t speak in complete sentences and don’t usually make any sense. They may also substitute words or use words that aren’t recognizable. Their comprehension of other people’s conversations can be impaired, causing them to not understand others as well. Lastly, their written sentences don’t make sense. (Aphasia, 2018). There are also physical impairments that go hand and hand with aphasia. The impairments are hemiparesis, hemiplegia, and hemisensory impairment (Owens, 2014). Hemiparesis is when one side of the body is weaker because of strength and control reduction. Hemiplegia is when one side of the body is paralyzed, hence paralysis. Hemisensory impairment is the lack of feeling on the affected side of the body, where pain or touch isn’t felt (Owens, 2014). According to (Owens, 2014), “it is necessary to complete a thorough assessment of each client’s abilities and deficits” (p. 157). To assess the client with aphasia, it is good to look at the client’s medical history. It is helpful to know what the patient’s history is just so they can safely treat the client and see if there is any significant causes for this communication disorder. Another assessment for aphasia would be an interview with the client and their family (Owens, 2014). They can use the information collected from the interview to help them figure out how to treat the client. The peripheral speech mechanism will be examined as well as a speech and language test to conclude the assessment. Treatment for the patient would be routinely meeting for speech therapy with an SLP. The SLP would have to determine what skills need to be worked on such as memory and auditory comprehension, specific skill deficits, or cross-modality training (Owens, 2014).
There are aspects of this communication disorder that needs to be further researched. Since aphasia is mostly the result of strokes in a client, research needs to be further taken on why strokes occur and what can be done to prevent strokes. Another helpful aspect would be understanding why aphasia is a result of a stroke. Different types of aphasia are the result of different parts of the brain being negatively affected by either a stroke, tumor, or head injury. It would be helpful for the future to study why the left hemisphere or the frontal lobe is affected when acquiring aphasia.