SAN DIEGO -It's an awesome video. An old man in thick glasses and a blue shirt is sitting in a wheelchair. A therapist sits in front of him, off camera. She tries to make him say he is thirsty, but can not produce the words. There are many years man has had a stroke that damaged the part of his brain that allows him to speak, a condition known as aphasia name.
Then slowly things start to change. The therapist begins to hum a simple melody, haunting: two notes at the same height, a third a little higher up, then down. "I thi-i-rsty," she sings. Resting his hand on the table, she taps the hand of man in time, encouraging him to sing. "I'm thirsty," he sings in harmony . She sings the phrase; he sings back. She says the sentence. He says it back. How about on a hot day like today, she asks. "I am thirst ," he says. Within minutes, a stroke patient who was unable to speak for years has learned to express a basic human need.
The patient is Melodic Intonation therapy course. the technique was developed because many patients who can not speak can still sing. Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist at Harvard University, is studying how and why this treatment seems to work for many patients failed to other forms of speech therapy. It is running a randomized clinical trial of the therapy and so far it looks pretty good find. He spoke during ' a session yesterday on the language of music interactions in the brain at the annual meeting of the American Association for the advancement of Science (which publishes Science NOW).
the race of the patients had damage to part of the left side of their brains involved in language. But similar areas on the right side of the brain may also be used, if the treatment can reach. Making music rotates on a large part of the brain at a time. It urges the skills hearing, emotion, and motor. "Singing can give entry into a broken system by engaging the right hemisphere," says Schlaug. He compared the brain images of patients before and after therapy and found that the right side of the brain changes, both structurally and functionally.
and patients also change. in another video, a man tries to give his address. he fights, but he can not get the words. it is clearly frustrated . It is 4 years after stroke, and man has tried many treatments, all the talk in vain. Then, in a second video taken after 75 therapy sessions Melodic Intonation, man recites his number home, street, and city.
Schlaug think therapy is not widely used in part because many people are embarrassed to sing. "therapists might have a problem to sing with a patient ' he said. And not just therapists. "Most of our male patients have a problem with that." But they install, and therapy itself is easy, he said. "Our next goal is to teach patients caregivers."
0 Komentar