Browsing by Subject "Afasia; akuutti"

Aphasia is an aquired language disorder that can follow the loss or damage of brain tissue. A lot of methods for speech and language rehabilitation of aphasia have been developed and their efficacy in the chronic stages of aphasia have been studied. In Finland more than 6000 people each year are affected by aphasia as a result of a left-hemisphere stroke or other damage to the language areas of the brain. Most of them are patients of speech and langugage pathologists from the acute stage on, but there aren’t many studies of the methods or efficacy of rehabilitation of acute aphasia. In this study the purpose is to introduce previous research that have looked into the methods used by speech and language pathologists in the acute phase of aphasia, as well as to find information on the effectiveness of these methods. This study is a descriptive literature review. The data was collected using EBSCO-, ProQuest Linguistics - and PubMed databases. The search terms used in this descriptive literature review were aphasia, early, acute, rehabilitation and intervention. Data collection followed the selection criteria set out in the study: 1) the research was peer-reviewed, 2) year of publication from 2000 to 2016, 3) available in English language, 4) full text available, 5) The studied subject was speech and language pathology rehabilitation to people with aphasia following stroke and the rehabilitation began within 2 weeks after lesion and was carried out during 3 months from the starting point. The search returned 113 articles from which the application of selection criteria produced the final data of 7 items. Information retrieval and interpretation of data followed the principles of descriptive literature review. No conclusive evidence of the effectiveness acute aphasia speech therapy rehabilitation came up in my study. However, it would appear that the stroke patients not only tolerated but in many case benefitted from up to daily speech therapy rehabilitation. Methods used in the acute phase rehabilitation are not spesific to early interventions, but identical to those of chronic aphasia rehabilitation and their use often continues seamlessly from the acute stage onwards. Their usability in the acute phase after stroke was good.