Speech Recovery Can Continue for Years

Jeff Porter
Stroke of Faith

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

I've been convinced that stroke recovery doesn't all happen in the short term - a year or less. In my own  experience with aphasia, it can take years to recover.

Now, I see a Wall Street Journal article about how new therapies help stroke survivors recover language years after injury:

• Encouraging new evidence is emerging to suggest the brain’s plasticity, or its ability to change and heal, may last many years after injury—far longer than the commonly assumed plateau for speech recovery of about six months to a year after stroke. Insurers, for example, may only cover the cost of one-on-one speech therapy sessions for the first few months.
• “The conventional wisdom has long been that after a year post-stroke, you aren’t going to get any better,” says Cynthia Thompson, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Language Recovery at Northwestern University. “But the brain continues to change until you die."

Certainly, in my case, rapid change took place in the first few months after my stroke in 1998 - starting with complete lack of speech back to a career in journalism.

But later, even years later, I would catch incremental improvements. Now, I still have some lasting effects (in my opinion) in the speech department, but I refuse to rule out even additional improvements.

See the original article:

Speech Recovery Can Continue for Years

in

Stroke of Faith