Wednesday, February 13, 2008

China pushes into stuttering

I am pleased to see that Chinese scientists are also pushing into stuttering research. I have always been impressed by their drive, patience and cleverness. It is an open secret that the outstanding success of US science has often been driven by foreign (including Asian) scientists at US universities, and not by the more commercial and evolution-denying US Americans, but who have provided the financial and political safe haven needed for science to prosper. China is changing and more Chinese scientists see a good future at home. Check out their abstract here. They found structural differences in stuttering brains using MRI. I need to look at their article to know more.

Song LP, Peng DL, Jin Z, Yao L, Ning N, Guo XJ, Zhang T.

Rehabilitation College, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100068, China.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the differences of regional grey matter volume between adults with persistent developmental stuttering and fluent speaking adults, and to determine whether stutterers have anomalous anatomy of speech-relevant brain areas that possibly affect speech fluency. METHODS: High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning was performed on 10 adults with developmental stuttering, aged 26 (21 - 35) with the onset age of 4 (3 - 7) and 12 age, sex, hand preference, and education-matched controls. The customized brain templates were created in order to improve spatial normalization and segmentation. Then automated preprocessing of MRI data was conducted using an optimized version of VBM, a fully automated unbiased and objective whole-brain MRI analysis technique. RESULTS: VBM analysis revealed that compared with the controls, the stuttering adults had significant clusters of locally gray matter volume increased in the superior temporal, middle temporal, precentral and postcentral gyrus, and inferior parietal lobule of the bilateral hemisphere (P <>

2 comments:

Dave Rowley said...

Didn't know you could read Chinese! As far as I know, the full article is in Chinese only.

Tom Weidig said...

OK maybe I should re-read the abstract then! :-)