Patients with poststroke aphasia have higher mortality rates and worse functional outcome than patients without aphasia. Nurses are well aware of aphasia and the associated problems for patients with stroke because they have daily contact with them. The challenge is to provide evidence-based care directed at the aphasia. Although rehabilitation stroke guidelines are available, they do not address the caregiving of nurses to patients with aphasia. The aim of this study was to explore the evidence on rehabilitation of stroke patients with aphasia in relation to nursing care, focusing on the following themes: (1) the identification of aphasia, (2) the effectiveness of speech-language interventions.The findings of this study can be used to develop nursing rehabilitation guidelines for stroke patients with aphasia. Further research is necessary to explore the feasibility of using such guidelines in clinical nursing practice and to examine the experiences of patients with nursing interventions directed at aphasia.
From the introduction: "There are two variants of fronto-temporal dementia: a behavioral variant (behavioral FTD, bvFTD, Neary et al. (1998)), which causes changes in behavior and personality but leaves syntax, phonology and semantics relatively intact, and a variant that causes impairments in the language processing system (Primary Progessive Aphasia, PPA (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2004). PPA can be subdivided into subtypes fluent (fluent but empty speech, comprehension of word meaning is affected / `semantic dementia') and non-fluent (agrammatism, hesitant or labored speech, word finding problems). Some identify logopenic aphasia as a FTD-variant: fluent aphasia with anomia but intact object recognition and underlying word meaning."
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Pauses in speech may be categorized on the basis of their length. Some authors claim that there are two categories (short and long pauses) (Baken & Orlikoff, 2000), others claim that there are three (Campione & Véronis, 2002), or even more. Pause lengths may be affected in speakers with aphasia. Individuals with dementia probably caused by Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or Parkinson’s disease (PD) interrupt speech longer and more frequently. One infrequent form of dementia, non-fluent primary progressive aphasia (PPA-NF), is even defined as causing speech with an unusual interruption pattern (”hesitant and labored speech”). Although human listeners can often easily distinguish pathological speech from healthy speech, it is unclear yet how software can detect the relevant patterns. The research question in this study is: how can software measure the statistical parameters that characterize the disfluent speech of PPA-NF/AD/PD patients in connected conversational speech?
