Lecture 7: From lesions to impairments

Question 1

What are some of the common impairments in stroke patients?

Answer 1

• Motor deficits
• Dysphagia: Difficulty swallowing
• Visual impairments
• Aphasia: Language deficits
• etc…

Question 2

What determines which deficit you might get?

Answer 2

It depends on the area of the brain that is affected as well as the extent of the damage

Question 3

A paper called Predicting Language Outcome and Recovery after Stroke was presented in class, what was it about?

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

If you have to patients with damage in the same brain region, will them necessarily have the same symptoms?

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

How do we know that many brain regions support both speech comprehension and production?

Answer 5

• Through the study of lesions and functional imaging

Question 6

When does the effect of a lesion is less pronounced?

Answer 6

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.