Rehabilitation of Post-stroke Aphasia by Targeting Phonological, and Lexico-semantic Deficits With Speech Output Tasks (PHOLEXSEM)

Istituto Auxologico Italiano

Status: Completed

Conditions: Anomia; Stroke; Aphasia, Acquired

Treatments: Behavioral: PACE; Behavioral: PHOLEXSEM

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT06451731

25C501

Details and patient eligibility

About

Aphasia in brain-damaged adult patients refers "to the more or less complete loss of the ability to use language" resulting from acquired brain damage, typically of the left hemisphere. The defective spoken output of persons with aphasia (PWA) has anomia as a main clinical manifestation. Improving anomia is a main goal of any language treatment.

The present randomized controlled study assessed the effectiveness of a novel, two-week, rehabilitation protocol (PHOLEXSEM), focused on PHonological, SEmantic, and LExical deficits, aiming at improving lexical retrieval, and, generally, spoken output.

The effects of the PHOLEXSEM treatment were compared to those of a control treatment, i.e., a Promoting Aphasics Communicative Effectiveness (PACE) protocol.

Finally, we studied the effects of age, education, disease duration, brain lesion volume, and functional independence (Functional Idependence Measure, FIM) on the treatment-induced linguistic improvements.

Enrollment: 44 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 90 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• acquired brain-damage
• presence of aphasia

Exclusion criteria

• global aphasia
• undergoing another treatment for aphasia

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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44 participants in 2 patient groups

PHOLEXSEM

Experimental group

Description:

Each session lasted 30 minutes, and comprised three sections, each lasting 10 minutes: Repetition, Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA), and Lexical retrieval. Repetition: 50 items for different kind of stimuli including: syllables, 2-syllable words and non-words; 2-syllable words and non-words with one consonant cluster; 3-syllable words and non-words; 3-syllable words and non-words with one consonant cluster, nuclear phrases. SFA: stimuli were 46 pictures of nouns, including living and non-living objects, controlled for frequency of use. Lexical retrieval phase: the patient was given three fluency tasks: a) 4 min of phonemic recall, b) 4 min of semantic recall, and c) 2 min of verb recall.

Treatment:

Behavioral: PHOLEXSEM

PACE

Active Comparator group

Description:

Three decks of cards - diversified by frequency of use - depicting nouns, were presented in sets of 4 cards each. In an exchange modality, the task consisted in understanding the noun chosen by the patient and, in turn, by the rehabilitator. Any communicative modality (oral, gestural, verbal, graphic) was allowed. Word difficulty was graded based on the frequency of use and semantic proximity or distance between target and distractors.

Treatment:

Behavioral: PACE