When areas of the brain related to language are affected, especially during a stroke or a head trauma, difficulties in expressing and understanding written and / or oral language occur. Called aphasia, this language disorder can be reduced or even disappear thanks to speech therapy sessions.
However, there are rare pathologies for which anticipatory speech therapy sessions can be useful even before the aphasia breaks out. This is the case with neurodegenerative diseases such as primary progressive aphasia or Alzheimer’s disease.
A progressive deterioration of language
Primary progressive aphasia, or PAD, is a rare degenerative disease (5 cases per 100,000 people) that affects regions of the left hemisphere, including the frontal and temporal cortex. Linked to language, these gradually damaged areas will lead to various and irremediable difficulties: loss of the meaning of words, lack of words, syntax or speech problems, spelling mistakes, etc.
In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, language disorders usually occur after immediate memory impairment. Because of his cognitive losses, the patient will then tend to look for his words, and failing to find them, to replace them by other close words or by their definition. For example, the spoon will be replaced by “what we eat our soup with”, or the umbrella by “what protects us from the rain”. Vocabulary is getting poorer and pronunciation is more and more disturbed.
“Language canes” to lean on when language difficulties arise
Faced with these emerging and evolving language difficulties, speech therapy can help support the patient. “Speech therapy will constitute an action of prevention and support for the patient in the slow degradation of his language”, explains Nathaly Joyeux, speech therapist in Avignon. “Rather than trying to restore the language to the same, we will offer the patient compensation means, such as language notebooks or vocabulary notebooks that he will have available. “
Thanks to these “language canes” on which he will be able to rest, the patient will learn to communicate differently, before the aphasia has had time to interfere in his daily life. “Insofar as he has a care that gives him the means to lean on it, it is much less distressing than doing nothing and simply observing the degradation of the language”, underlines the speech therapist. Gradually, and as his language deteriorates, the patient will be able to use the communication tools offered by the speech therapist.
If this management is the only option offered to patients with primary progressive aphasia, it is less systematic in the context of the disease.Alzheimer’s, while the difficulties of expression are real. “Doctors do not systematically think of offering speech therapy,” deplores Nathaly Joyeux. A regrettable lack of prescription, especially since these anticipatory speech therapy sessions are covered by social security in the context of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, under a long-term illness (ALD).
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