Saturday, March 10, 2012

Emergent topics, Neurogenic stuttering: Theys find that neurogenic stuttering is due to lessions across a network

She focuses on patients with neurogenic stuttering after strokes.

Many case studies are known.

She talked about prevalance, functioning, MRI scans, and aim to find the lession locations

She had N=37, 17 neurogenic stutterers and 20 controls.

9 areas of the left hemisphere showed differences between control strokes: all important for speech production. She suggest that the location lessions are part of a network that disintegrate and leads to stuttering.

Due to limited coverage, other area might not appear in this study. But her results are consistent with most current understanding of the neurobiological basis.

Interesting avenue, but i am not sure whether you can 100% relate to developmental stuttering. I asked whether there are differences in people who stutter since childhood and those due to a stroke. She said that some patients especially with Parkinson behave differently, but many are similar to "normal" stutterers.

After the talk, I had the opportunity to have an in-depth discussion on her research. An interesting aspect is that most patients are HAPPY to stutter as it is a sign that they improve because the stroke led to a temporal inability to speak.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello Tom !
I enjoyed talking to you at this meeting, though I couldn't attend your presentation as planned - not only because of the three stories and my poor knees- but I am studying the book you gave me.Thanks !

As for Carolyn Theys' presentation I appreciated it too. I diagnosed dozen of post stroke stutterings in my medical career, all ages..and different localisations on the scanners (in the early days) and on the RMI...everytime somewhere dealing with the production of speech . The hypothesis of a "neural network" is plausible.

The patients lacked reactionnal attitudes (not yet built, I guess) and were easy to take care of - and many spontaneously recovered their previous fluency.

The stuttering manners were most of the time soft and swift, with few stops and few blockages.

in Parkinson disease, the disfluencies (palilalia) occur at the begginning of sentences and are accompanied by a terrible quickening of the outflow, a decrease of sonority and a voice tremor.

One extrapyramidal disease presents disfluences closer to developmental stuttering : it is called "Steele-Richardson-Olewski syndrome". The disfluencies presents a more explosive quality.

Dr M-C Monfrais-Pfauwadel