Grant: CIHR Fellowship

There are an estimated 50,000 strokes in Canada each year, costing the Canadian economy $3.6 billion a year in physician services, hospital costs, lost wages, and decreased productivity. Stroke survivors with a left inferior frontal gyrus lesion generally receive a diagnosis of non-fluent aphasia (i.e. difficulties with the production of speech), and typically do not respond well to traditional speech therapy. Because it has been shown that patients with severe nonfluent aphasia are better at singing words than they are at pronouncing them, several researchers have proposed using sung words instead of spoken words to help them recover their language abilities. Indeed, the brain regions dedicated to singing are mainly located in the right hemisphere (opposite to the lesion) and the recruitment of these brain regions, as part of a therapy, often allows a certain recovery (e.g. an improvement of their language abilities). Unfortunately, these melodic therapies are generally carried out several months after a stroke, and are very costly in time for both the therapist and the patient. Thus, we propose that an intensive singing intervention performed during hospitalization (i.e. when the brain is most malleable) is ideal to facilitate language recovery in aphasic patients. Singing is natural and very easily done in hospitals, at minimal costs. The proposed project will attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of this intervention by quantifying the language improvements, and observing the cerebral changes associated to them. Moreover, the collected data will allow for the identification of patients for whom an intense singing intervention would be optimal, based on the location of their injury. Ultimately, this project will provide probative evidence to justify an intensive singing intervention with aphasic patients.