Deans' stroke musings: Performance Variability as a Predictor of Response to Aphasia Treatment

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Performance Variability as a Predictor of Response to Aphasia Treatment

Once again researchers are not looking at objective diagnosis scans of dead and damaged areas to predict the ability to recover. This research is basically useless because of non objective starting points, you'll never be able to repeat the research with any sort of assurance that the starting points were equal.
http://nnr.sagepub.com/content/30/9/876?etoc

¹University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
²Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Toronto, ON, Canada
³University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

E. Susan Duncan, MA, MS, Department of Neurology, UC, Room 3130 Biological Sciences III, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Email: duncane@uci.edu

Abstract

Background. Performance variability in individuals with aphasia is typically regarded as a nuisance factor complicating assessment and treatment.

Objective. We present the alternative hypothesis that intraindividual variability represents a fundamental characteristic of an individual’s functioning and an important biomarker for therapeutic selection and prognosis.

Methods. A total of 19 individuals with chronic aphasia participated in a 6-week trial of imitation-based speech therapy. We assessed improvement both on overall language functioning and repetition ability. Furthermore, we determined which pretreatment variables best predicted improvement on the repetition test.

Results. Significant gains were made on the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB) Aphasia Quotient, Cortical Quotient, and 2 subtests as well as on a separate repetition test. Using stepwise regression, we found that pretreatment intraindividual variability was the only predictor of improvement in performance on the repetition test, with greater pretreatment variability predicting greater improvement. Furthermore, the degree of reduction in this variability over the course of treatment was positively correlated with the degree of improvement.

Conclusions. Intraindividual variability may be indicative of potential for improvement on a given task, with more uniform performance suggesting functioning at or near peak potential.