Intensive aphasia interventions: New insights from individual response analysis-Maya Menahemi Falkov

Описание: Lecture in the C-STAR series, by Maya Menahemi-Falkov (La Trobe University) delivered on November 4th, 2021.

Intensive aphasia intervention programs have recently been promoted as best-practice for chronic post-stroke aphasia. Yet, the individual response rates of intensive interventions remain unclear, both immediately and over time. To date, systematic reviews of aphasia rehabilitation have not focused on the individual response rates, neither with respect to immediate nor with respect to the maintenance of therapy gains, which could limit their clinical usefulness.

In our review, we investigated the response of individual participants, both immediate and long-term, to behavioural intensive aphasia therapy programs for adults with chronic aphasia. We explored data from 44 group-level and single case studies (n=670) to analyse individual therapy response rates and maintenance of therapeutic gains. We carried out meta-synthesis by calculating and analysing the Minimal Detectable Change (MDC) metric to determine benchmarks for a statistically significant change score on the individual level for six common aphasia outcome measures. We found that while intensive aphasia therapy is effective when measured at the group level, many individuals do not respond significantly to the intervention, and even fewer preserve their gains.

In this talk I will discuss strategies to assess treatment success at the individual-participant level and its relevance to clinical decision-making. Finally, the potential factors affecting the maintenance of therapy gains will be discussed, along with clinical implications.

Maya Menahemi-Falkov's faculty webpage: https://scholars.latrobe.edu.au/mmena...