Aphasia Research Laboratory, Department of Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 326, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
Brain Lang. 2020 Aug;207:104809. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2020.104809. Epub 2020 Jun 5.
Naming treatment outcomes in post-stroke aphasia are variable and the factors underlying this variability are incompletely understood. In this study, 26 patients with chronic aphasia completed a semantic judgment fMRI task before receiving up to 12 weeks of naming treatment. Global (i.e., network-wide) and local (i.e., regional) graph theoretic measures of pre-treatment functional connectivity were analyzed to identify differences between patients who responded most and least favorably to treatment (i.e., responders and nonresponders) and determine if network measures predicted naming improvements. Responders had higher levels of global integration (i.e., average network strength and global efficiency) than nonresponders, and these measures predicted treatment effects after controlling for lesion volume and age. Group differences in local measures were identified in several regions associated with a variety of cognitive functions. These results suggest there is a meaningful and possibly prognostically-informative relationship between patients' functional network properties and their response to naming therapy.
命名卒中后失语症的治疗结果存在差异，且这种差异的潜在因素尚未完全阐明。在这项研究中，26 名慢性失语症患者在接受长达 12 周的命名治疗前完成了语义判断 fMRI 任务。对治疗前功能连接的全局（即全网范围）和局部（即区域）图论测量进行分析，以确定对治疗反应最有利和最不利的患者（即反应者和无反应者）之间的差异，并确定网络测量是否可以预测命名改善。反应者的全局整合水平（即平均网络强度和全局效率）高于无反应者，并且这些测量在控制病变体积和年龄后可以预测治疗效果。在与各种认知功能相关的几个区域中，发现了局部测量的组间差异。这些结果表明，患者的功能网络特性与其对命名治疗的反应之间存在着有意义的、可能具有预后意义的关系。
