Professor Cathy Price
UCL
United Kingdom
Predicting Language Outcome and Recovery After Stroke (PLORAS)
The Stroke Association
273,077
01/10/2014
3
Patients with aphasia want to know when they will recover. We have developed a new approach that predicts long term recovery of speech and language abilities, for individual patients, on the basis of how other patients, in our database, with matching lesion and non-lesion factors recovered over time. A new patient can therefore be given an individualised probabilistic estimate of the most likely time course of recovery, with a confidence rating based on how consistent the recovery was in other patients. We can
already generate useful predictions about future speech production abilities for right handed adults with left hemisphere stroke who speak English as a first language. To extend our predictions to a wider range of patients and skills, and improve the precision of the predictions we can already make, we need to substantially increase our database with more cross-sectional and longitudinal measures from patients at all stages of recovery including those with English as a second language (i.e. bilingual speakers). Hence, we seek funding for: (1) an NHS site co-ordinator to manage recruitment from more than 60 different collaborating NHS sites; and (2) a bilingual officer to assess aphasia in British bilingual patients whose first language is not English.