Bruce Willis’s farewell to the film industry has caused a stir, due to the consequences of aphasia

The 67-year-old American actor has been diagnosed with aphasia, which, his family wrote in a post on Instagram, “is impacting his cognitive abilities”

Aphasia is a language disorder due mainly to neurological disorders.

The main one, the most common disease, is usually a stroke.

Then there can also be neurological but degenerative disorders that can lead to the same problem of aphasia, depending on what happens to the person.

Stroke is a real ‘blow’, as the origin of the word says, it is a sudden thing.

The aphasic person suddenly loses the power of speech.

In addition to other symptoms, which may be of a motor nature, the aphasic person suddenly loses the ability to articulate, to speak, to express himself.

How can a person with aphasia speak?

It depends on the type of lesion, on the area that has been affected.

We have two cerebral hemispheres: the left hemisphere, usually the dominant one, is the one where our language is located, the areas of our language, and each area of this hemisphere deals with particular characteristics of our language.

So, on the basis of this, the aphasic may be a person who can no longer articulate words as before, or a person who apparently seems to speak as before, but the words come out crooked, distorted, they are no longer what they had in mind to say.

Or, in very severe cases, he cannot articulate any sounds at all.

There may also be a disturbance in comprehension, especially at the beginning.

Then perhaps the comprehension disorder regresses, but the aphasic person may also have difficulty understanding what others are saying.

While stroke is the most common cause of aphasia, degenerative forms may also occur

There is a disease called primary progressive aphasia, a degenerative disorder that belongs more to the cognitive level disorders, such as dementia, where affected patients – this is also an extremely dramatic disorder – progressively lose the ability to use words.

Thinking about Bruce Willis and all aphasia patients, one wonders whether it is possible to recover from this disease

Aphasia cannot disappear because, unfortunately, if there has been a stroke, there has been damage to an area of our brain.

But you can certainly improve.

There is a spontaneous improvement that occurs in the early stages after a person has had a stroke, but then speech therapy rehabilitation is extremely important.

All people with aphasia should have access to good speech rehabilitation.

Unfortunately, this is sometimes a very long process.

With the best techniques we try to implement, we reactivate areas of the brain, neuronal connections which stimulate the re-use of lost words.

However, this is not a short rehabilitation process; I follow patients for one or two years, and it is by no means quick.

The aphasic patient is a person who experiences this disease with great suffering

Not being able to communicate with others, not being able to speak, isolates them from the rest of the family environment.

Then, often, they are people who are still working, because unfortunately the stroke appears also in quite young people.

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Source:

Agenzia Dire