Singing Therapy-Helps Stroke Patients Regain Language

Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Regain Language, says the Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. They are treating stroke patients who have very little or no spontaneous speech, by associating melodies with words and phrases and guess what Baby Boomers, it works.

This is great news for Baby Boomers when about 200,000 people in America have strokes affecting speech, with a language disorder each year and we are a large portion of these statistics.

Scientists are using the basic connection of singing and language to help restore speech with stroke patients.

They still have not figured out the reason that some with brain damage can sing but not speak, but they do know that there is a link in the brain that connects verbal abilities such as singing and speech. They also know that music experience also has positive impact on healthy individuals’ verbal abilities.

Photo:Your Brain On Music

Now Baby Boomers, I do not know about you but when I sing I feel good…so, let us not forget that. But then, I am not a scientist.

They think that perhaps one of the reasons why the brain can manage singing but not speaking when a person has a stroke is due to the simple fact that when most mothers (and Dads) speak to children, it’s often in a singsong tone. That’s no coincidence, scientists say, given that music and language are so intricately linked within our brains.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) scientists are now using fundamental connections between song and speech to treat patients who have lost their ability to communicate and speak. Evidence shows that music can be used to help people with severe brain impairments learn how to speak again.

“Music, and music-making, is really a very special form of a tool or an intervention that can be used to treat neurological disorders. There’s rarely any other activity that could really activate or engage this many regions of the brain that is experienced as being a joyous activity,” stated Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel and Harvard University.

In America alone, there are between 750,000 and 800,000 strokes per year. Of those, 200,000 of them result in a kind of language disorder called aphasia and around one third of those stroke patients have aphasia so severe that they become non fluent. That basically means that around 60,000 to 70,000 patients per year could benefit from the music therapy.

Beth Israel is the only Medical Center doing research on Singing Therapy-Helps Stroke Patients Regain Language. However, there are speech therapists throughout America who are using some kind of music treatment. To read the full story, go to CNN News.