Modelo de rastreabilidade da afasia: sob a perspectiva da reabilitação

Abstract

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by injury or dysfunction in the brain and directly affects the individual's communication. The most common cause of aphasia is stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI), mainly in the left hemisphere, where language function is usually located. Approximately one-third of people who have had a stroke develop aphasia. The severity of aphasia changes over time, and some aspects of language may improve, while others remain compromised. The aphasic individual should receive treatment with language stimulation. Typically, rehabilitation involves training strategies with a battery of language tasks, however, monitoring the aphasic is difficult to achieve. In this study, the objective is the development of a model of aphasia tracking, with the perspective of subsidizing the performance of health professionals during the rehabilitation process. With the perspective of application in other rehabilitation and clinical areas, outside the hospital environment, the Aphasia Rehabilitation Support Model (MARA) developed in this study, has three pillars at its core: daily accessibility (cost and mobility of the equipment), usability (ease of use of the therapy equipment) and if the technology is invasive or not for the patient. We adopted the language assessment protocol developed by the American Society of Functional Neuroradiology, which includes four tasks: sentence completion, silent word generation, rhyming and object naming. A portable electroencephalogram was used to collect brain signals. The sample was composed of aphasic people with preserved comprehension, right hemiparesis, and left hemisphere damaged by stroke. Four electrodes (F3/F7 and F4/F8) corresponding to the left/right frontal cortex were analyzed. We observed increased electrical activation in the non-language dominant hemisphere. This may be revealing a migration of language, contralateral processing. This result is very interesting because the idea is that whoever migrates function to the other side, recovers more language. The results found suggest that the tracking model can be used in the rehabilitation of aphasia in stroke patients, but the laterality of the lesion and the presence of hemiparesis should be considered when analyzing the results.