Predicting recovery and treatment responses in post-stroke aphasia
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Predicting recovery and treatment responses in post-stroke aphasia
IRAS ID
229396
Contact name
Thomas M. H. Hope
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University College London
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
540449, UCL project number; ??, UCL Data Protection number
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 8 months, 31 days
Research summary
Stroke survivors with language difficulties, are famously variable. Some recover much more quickly or fully than others, and some have much better responses to treatment than others. This variation has traditionally been treated as an unfortunate but fixed limit on our understanding of the recovery process. And with the limit in place, it has been nearly impossible to prove that any particular speech and language therapy really works: even in the most successful rehabilitation studies, treatment effects are typically too inconsistent to drive routine acceptance in the clinic.
In recent years, one promising way to lift this limit – to explain more of these patients’ variability – has begun to emerge. Different brain regions serve different functions: it stands to reason that the consequences of stroke should depend on the details of the brain regions which are damaged or preserved. Using high-resolution imaging technology, those details can be measured, non-invasively, in very large samples of patients whose outcomes are already known. Past research has already shown that these details can be used to predict language outcomes years after stroke, with some confidence. The aim of the proposed work is to employ similar techniques to relate the details of the lesions a patient has suffered, to both the recovery of their language skills and their responses to speech and language therapy in the first weeks after stroke occurs.
The data required to do this, including high-resolution brain images and clinical case notes detailing therapeutic interventions and their results, are already available: the work required to collect them began some years ago, and has been approved and funded independently of this proposal. The analyses proposed here will put that data to work, deriving results which could begin to fill an important, expensive gap in current medicine.
REC name
London - Brighton & Sussex Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/LO/1530
Date of REC Opinion
19 Sep 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion