What is aphasia?

Aphasia is a common syndrome that occurs after brain injury, such as stroke, head trauma, brain tumors, degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and brain infections. As a result of brain injury, the central nervous system's ability to process language information is lost or damaged, resulting in the loss or weakening of the original language communication ability, which may occur in both understanding and expression.

Symptoms

The common clinical aphasia symptoms can be divided into the following types:

• Impaired naming ability: the patient may not be able to name an item correctly or mispronounce the name of the item.
• Poor oral expression: aphasia patients' oral expression ability is often compromised, such as content disorder, not following the rules of grammar, or often missing some important keywords, so that people sometimes cannot understand what he/she is saying. Some patients are unable to express themselves in fluent sentences, each sentence very short; they pause a lot, hesitate, and slur. This is because diseases in different parts of the brain produce different symptoms.
• Impaired repetition: the inability to repeat what someone else has said is also an important indicator.
• Impaired auditory comprehension: this loss of ability is often harder to detect if it is slight, because patients can use other cues like facial expressions or gestures to understand what we're saying, but not really understand it.
• Impaired reading and writing: impaired language skills can also occur in reading and writing, depending on the degree of central nervous system damage.

Can aphasia be cured?

The relatives and friends of aphasia patients often think that the patients seem to become dumb. People often find themselves talking at cross-purposes with the patients or the patients seem puzzled as to what others are saying. In fact, aphasia patients temporarily lose their original language ability due to brain injury. As long as they are patiently encouraged and supported, and receive professional speech therapy, their language competence still has a chance to recover to a certain extent.

How to help aphasia patients?

If someone around you has aphasia due to a stroke or car accident, here's our advice:

• Treat him/her as normal people.
• Because aphasia patients have difficulty in understanding, it is necessary to explain things to patients in a simple, clear and slow way, sometimes to repeat the explanation.
• Encourage patients to speak in a way of praise and encouragement so that patients have the opportunity to express themselves.
• Try to give patients the opportunity to listen to others, such as family gatherings, watching TV, listening to the radio, etc.
• Take him to a professional speech therapist.