Neuroimaging markers of therapy-induced recovery of language after brain damage
Cognitive impairments are a costly consequence of an aging population and a major challenge for health services in the 21st century. To tackle this challenge, we need to combine the understanding of the human cognitive system and its impairments (cognitive neuroscience), measures of brain function (neuroimaging), and the challenges faced by patients and clinicians (clinical neuropsychology). Aphasia ¿ difficulties with speech and language following a stroke ¿ represents a perfect example of a very debilitating disorder where such an integration is both lacking and much needed. Speech and language therapy is effective to ameliorate aphasia in general, but with a strong inter-individual variability. We still do not understand why some patients improve and some others do not. The present proposal is a development of one work package of the WinAphasia ITN project, which was aimed at developing a new rehabilitation platform and new prognostic markers of recovery by assessing the likelihood of therapy gains given the initial behavioral and neurological profile of the patient. Here we aim at identifying a set of neurostructural and neurofunctional parameters, obtained through state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging, which predicts the severity of language disorders in the post-acute stage and the degree of therapy-induced recovery. The results of this project will allow, for the first time, to analyze the sensitivity of different neuroimaging markers for predicting behavioral measures of change. This, in turn, will provide valuable information about which measure can be used to evaluate treatment efficacy.