Lecture 7: From lesions to impairments Flashcards
What are some of the common impairments in stroke patients?
- Motor deficits
- Dysphagia: Difficulty swallowing
- Visual impairments
- Aphasia: Language deficits
- etc…
What determines which deficit you might get?
It depends on the area of the brain that is affected as well as the extent of the damage
A paper called Predicting Language Outcome and Recovery after Stroke was presented in class, what was it about?
- Specifically in aphasia:
- difficulty to comprehend and produce speech
- Many types of aphasia
- There is a relationship between lesion site and outcome
- After a lesion, specialist would evaluate speech of the patient:
- See output
- rate of speech
- grammar
- content
- writing
- See comprehension
- See output
If you have to patients with damage in the same brain region, will them necessarily have the same symptoms?
No, for example, aphasia might result from many different lesion sites. Moreover, fMRI studies have shown that the main source of subject variability to tasks is that there is a limited number of different ways of doing the task.
How do we know that many brain regions support both speech comprehension and production?
- Through the study of lesions and functional imaging
When does the effect of a lesion is less pronounced?
When there is alternative paths for the information to reach a certain area, the lesion might be less pronounced.
Also, if the lesion is smaller, this might affect less the patient.