You have seen many children and adults being bullied on impaired or stammering ways of speaking. You were not able to speak properly. Have you ever noticed this type of thing in your children, or are you confused with these terms? Scroll down and see what this means and how can you notice that any child or any adult has aphasia or dysphasia.
Let’s talk about what is aphasia and dysphasia—removing the confusion within these terms. These are both technically psychiatric disorders. Damages or injuries to the patients cause that. Sometimes it is caused by different problems. It acquires in children at an early age, but if not treated at the start, then it can continue as the child will grow.
Definition Of Aphasia:
Aphasia is known as the person’s inability to comprehend or speak something. The inability to write or read something. This is technically a communication disorder. These problems appear as a result of brain parts damage, those parts which are responsible for speech and language. This condition happens suddenly after brain damage or sudden brain injury, a stroke, or head injury.
Aphasia interrupts a person’s ability to understand language, to speak properly, or to write. Aphasia does not impair intelligence but impairs the thoughts of a person as the person is unable to use the right words for what he is thinking or speaking. Aphasia can be mild and can be serious that the person is unable to speak.
Causes of aphasia:
The injury of most parts of the left hemisphere is usually the cause of aphasia. Any damage or disorder to the parts of the brain controlling speech, communication causes aphasia. Damage of deep subcortical tissues of the brain also gets in line for aphasia. Some of the common causes of aphasia are:
- Stroke
- Paralysis
- Brain tumour
- Traumatic brain injury
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Neurological disorders
- Atrophy in brain tissues
- Dementia
- Epilepsy
- Infectious diseases
- Gunshot wound
- A Side effect of an opioid drug, fentanyl.
Signs and symptoms:
People with aphasia develop behavioural changes because of brain damage. The symptoms of aphasia depend upon which part of the brain is damaged. In some cases, signs and symptoms do not appear in the beginning or in the mild stage but can develop with the age or as the wound gets deep. Sometimes people hide this due to shame and stop communication. This is the worst part from here double damage starts and it’s hard to be treated. Symptoms of aphasia which are noticed commonly are:
- Unable to make words
- Unable to read words
- Unable to write anything
- Unable to speak words or sentences
- Unable to pronounce names.
- Anomia (unable to Name objects)
- Unable to repeat something which is said before.
- Repetition of a single word or phrase
- Speech automatism
- Paraphasia
- Agrammatism
- Limited speech
- No fluent speech or flow of words
- Speech disorder
- Struggling in finding correct words for telling the thoughts or explaining something.
- Pronouncing strange words
What are the types of aphasia?
The types of aphasia are due to its severity from mild to extreme impairment of brain function. Mainly it is divided into two types 1. Fluent, and 2. Non-fluent.
These types and patterns of aphasia vary from person to person and categorized from the location of brain injury in each case.
- Type #1 is Global Aphasia
- Type #2 is Broca’s Aphasia, also known as “non-fluent aphasia.”
- Type #3 is Mixed non-fluent Aphasia
- Type #4 is Wernicke’s Aphasia, also known as “fluent aphasia.”
- Type #5 is Anomic aphasia
- Type #6 is Primary progressive Aphasia
Aphasia can be mild or severe. This depends on the type of brain injury and which part is how much damage. In cases, if the patients stop communicating or hide this problem, he or she develops complex aphasia syndrome in isolation. This affects the ability to read, write, speak. And they are then followed by a stroke or dementia. The person should try to talk and converse with the people if still, the person has trouble speaking or understanding but should try and should participate.
Severe impairments happen but if it is diagnosed at the right time and retained speech, excellent results are shown.
How can it be treated?
Therapies come first in line for speech and language disorders. But the treatment is suggested upon these factors.
- Cause and reason for the brain injury
- Size of the damaged area
- Age of the patient
- Type of Aphasia.
In some cases like cancer or tumour, if these are developing in the part of the brain where speech is manufactured, then surgeries are the only option to retain communication.
For the people with a neurologic disorder, stroke, epilepsy, speech therapies, and language therapies create a good impact on the affected brain part. Some are learning the language in which speech is not involved also helps the person to explain his thoughts and act according to it.
Drawing pictures, use of hands also helps the patients to communicate and make him understand what is happening with him. This relaxes the patient. Make him comfortable that he or she speaks slowly and does not get excited while speaking. The more patients stay calm; the more effective treatment will be.
Make cards, use props for the affected person to show his feelings.
The last option is medications, drugs.
Definition of dysphasia:
Dysphasia means language disorder associated with the generation of speech. It refers to the partial loss of language. Dysphasia also refers to impaired language. This is technically a language disorder. Dysphasia appears when the parts of the brain that are responsible for making language and words are damaged. Those parts are responsible for giving words to your thoughts. But due to any head injury, brain damage, or stroke, they are unable to function properly.
Dysphasia also develops the verbal communication problem that is aphasia.
Causes of dysphasia:
People confuse dysphasia and dysarthria (speech disorder) or dysphagia (swallowing disorder). The main cause of dysphasia is Stroke and brain injury. And sometimes leads to aphasia. Dysphasia develops when there is damage in the part of the brain which is responsible for comprehension and Language production. Some other causes of dysphasia are:
- Strokes
- Brain infections
- Brain tumours
- Head injuries
- Neurodegenerative diseases
- Transient Ischemic attacks
- Migraines
- Seizures
- Parkinson’s disease.
Some causes of dysphasia are temporary And as the patient recovers from it, dysphasia also recovers.
There are some other certain reasons that can cause dysphagia are
- High cholesterol
- High blood pressure
- Diabetes
- Disturbed lifestyle
- Heart diseases.
Sometimes treating these underlying causes can also give good results of recovering dysphasia.
Symptoms and signs of dysphasia:-
The person with dysphasia has no impairment in thinking but can not comprehend it in words. The severity depends on the position of the damaged part and how severe the wound is. When people have dysphasia, they can possibly develop aphasia. The common signs of dysphasia are:
- Anomia
- Speaking small words, articles.
- Mixing of words
- Speaking fluently but with wrong pronunciation and words.
- Struggling to comprehend
- Taking time to understand
- Giving inappropriate answers
- Giving wrong meanings of words
- Making errors while speaking
- Nonsensical words
- Making different expressions
- Making wrong sentences
- Not able to remember sentences
- Not being able to speak long paragraphs or sentences
How to treat dysphasia?
Dysphasia occurs suddenly sometimes due to head or brain injury. And sometimes occur due to underlying hidden causes. Sometimes treating these causes also recover the patient’s dysphasia.
Other than these causes, speech, and language therapies help in reviving the brain damage. In severe cases, modern speech therapies help in redeveloping lost impaired skills. Some other treatments options are:
- Exercises to differentiate objects and sounds.
- Pronunciation exercises.
- Auditory memory exercises that involve listening exercises, processing information, and recalling things.
- Vocabulary exercises to redevelop vocabulary.
- Semantic exercises to improve understanding of context and meaning of sentences.
- Doing morpho-syntactic exercises like knowing when to use the correct pronouns and prepositions when forming a sentence.
What is paraphasia?
Making jumbled and mixed sentences due to speech disturbances in the language part of the brain Or error in language output is called Paraphasia. This speech disorder originates neurologically. Paraphasia is basically reversing the phrases like “bookmark” becomes “markbook”. Affected people switch the words and sentences.
Causes:
The lesion in the brain is usually caused by blockage of vessels or rupture of vessels, stroke. 80% of the paraphasias are usually caused by degenerative diseases, head injuries, poisoning, infections in the brain, dementia, metabolic disorders.
What is conduction aphasia?
Associative aphasia or conduction aphasia means inability to repeat and remember the sentences and words said. The affected person understands the conversation, speaks, writes, or reads. This condition has less impairment. Furthermore, it is called “disorder of repetition”.
Conduction aphasia is considered as mild aphasia. It requires speech language therapy to redevelop the lost skills.
Conduction aphasia is mainly caused by the damage of Parietal lobe. It is associated with the left hemisphere.
Before you go!
Aphasia and dysphasia affect about 2 million people globally. More than half of these develop this condition on their own. 2% of the people acquire this condition by traumatic head injuries. However, young children, middle-age children, and older adults are more likely to develop these conditions. Sometimes people acquire aphasia because they already had dysphasia. As the age increases, chances of stroke increases and stroke is the major cause of aphasia and dysphasia. People who are recovered with stroke experience aphasia 40% of the time. 75% of the people get diagnosed with these after a stroke and have slurred speech.
FAQs
What are the compensation techniques?
Does isolation affect aphasia or dysphasia?
Are medications given in these conditions?
What are the sites of subcortical aphasia?
In which conditions aphasia develops slowly and quickly.
Aphasia develops slowly in infections, Tumor, dementia, and other chronic diseases.
