Title: Transcranial direct current stimulation in primary progressive aphasia: Preliminary results and challenges
Speaker: Kyrana Tsapkini, Johns Hopkins University
Date: December 11, 2013; 12-1 PM
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 2208
Abstract:
Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative disease that primarily affects language functions and often begins in the fifth or sixth decade of life. In this talk I will present and discuss new data indicating that neuromodulatory treatment, using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) combined with a spelling intervention, shows some promise for maintaining or even improving language at least temporarily in PPA. The aim of this research is to determine whether tDCS plus language therapy is more effective than language therapy alone in treating written language in PPA. PPA participants underwent anodal tDCS or sham plus language therapy in a within-subject cross-over design during behavioral spelling therapy. They were evaluated before, after and at 2 weeks and 2 months post-intervention. All participants showed improvement with language therapy (with sham or tDCS). There was, however, a significant improvement for untrained items only in the tDCS plus language therapy condition compared to sham at all follow-up intervals. I will discuss these results in detail with emphasis to particular challenges of this method. Neuromodulation with tDCS offers promise as a means of augmenting language therapy to improve written language function at least temporarily in PPA. The consistent finding of generalization of treatment benefits to untreated items and the superior sustainability of treatment effects with tDCS justifies further investigations.
