Deans' stroke musings: Effects of Prefrontal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Lexical Access in Chronic Poststroke Aphasia

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.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

Effects of Prefrontal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Lexical Access in Chronic Poststroke Aphasia

Wrong objective, every stroke research should have an objective to create and distribute a protocol with efficacy ratings. This is just useless crapola as is.

Effects of Prefrontal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Lexical Access in Chronic Poststroke Aphasia

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Maria I. Pestalozzi, Marie Di Pietro, Chrisovalandou Martins Gaytanidis, ...

First Published October 1, 2018 Research Article

Abstract

Background. A successful interplay between prefrontal and domain-specific language areas is critical for language processing. Previous studies involving people with aphasia have shown that executive control processes might act on lexical-semantic representations during retrieval. Modulating the prefrontal control network by means of noninvasive brain stimulation might, therefore, improve lexical access in people with aphasia.
Objective. The present study investigates the effects of prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on lexical access in chronic poststroke aphasia.
Methods. We report data of 14 participants with chronic poststroke aphasia. We used a sham-tDCS (S-tDCS) controlled and double-blind within-subjects design. Performances in picture naming, verbal fluency, and word repetition were assessed immediately after stimulation.
Results. As compared with S-tDCS, anodal tDCS (A-tDCS) improved verbal fluency as well as the speed of naming high frequency words, but not word repetition.
Conclusion. The results of our study suggest that the brain network dedicated to lexical retrieval processing can be facilitated by A-tDCS over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This finding supports the notion that strengthening executive control functions after stroke could complement speech and language-focused therapy.