Acquired Childhood Aphasia

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Acquired Childhood Aphasia

• Braylen D. Rogers

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Definition

• Children with acquired language disorders had
  begun to develop language normally but then lost
  all or part of their communicative abilities as a
  result of neurological damage.

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Types of Brain Injury

• Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
• Strokes and Tumors
• Landau-Kleffner Syndrome

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Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

• Every year children 14 years and younger sustain
  a TBI that result in 3,000 deaths
• 29,000 hospitalization
• 400,000 emergency department visits
• 4 of all children kindergarten through twelfth
  grade have experienced some type of head trauma

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Causes

• Different age groups different causes
• Infants falls or abuse
• Preschoolers falls
• Young school-age Sports (thats me) and
  accidents involving them as pedestrians, bike or
  skateboard riders
• Adolescents sustain the most accidents, primarily
  as the result of motor vehicles

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Classification

• Based on scores of the Glasgow Coma Scale
• 13-15 mild brain injury
• 9-12 moderate brain injury
• 3-8 severe brain injury

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The Glasgow Coma Scale
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Strokes and Tumor

• Are most common causes for adult aphasia
• Only 0.5 per 100,000 children under 15
• More than 1/3 of childhood strokes occur during
  the first two years of life

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Causes

• The common causes of stroke in children are
  cardiac disease, vascular occlusion sickle cell
  disease, vascular malformation and hemorrhage.

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Landau-Kleffner Syndrome

• Least frequent cause of acquired language
  disorders
• A distinctive syndrome in which convulsive
  disorder, indicated by abnormal
  electroencephalogram (EEG) tracings, occurs at
  about the same time as a breakdown in language

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Conditions

• It has a low incidence. Only 198 cases reported
  since 1992
• Age of onset ranges from 1½ to 13 years
• Language regression may be gradual or sudden
• Males are affected twice as often as females
• Changes in aphasia, seizures and show normal EEG
  tracings but continue to exhibit aphasia. Others
  show opposite pattern

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Language Development and Language Recovery

• The prevailing view has been that brain-injured
  children differ from adults in three ways
• They have a lower risk of aphasia
• They present different language symptoms
• They recover faster and more fully than adults

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Recovery

• Toddlers and young children generally appear to
  recover best because
• Their brains withstand injury better than those
  of infants
• They have established certain spoken language
  skills and sometimes written language skills
  prior to injury
• They still have enough plasticity for functional
  reorganization of the brain to occur

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Recovery continued

• After age 5, childrens patterns of recovery from
  TBI become increasingly like those of adults
• However, children who acquire aphasia secondary
  to convulsive disorder generally recover better
  when onset occurs at older age
• Type and location of brain injury may also affect
  a childs recovery

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Language characteristics of kids with acquired
aphasia

• The first three months to a year following the
  brain injury is referred to as a period of
  spontaneous recovery

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Acute Recovery Period

• Comprehension A wide range of comprehension
  impairments are found among children with acute
  aphasia
• The severity of the comprehension disorders
  corresponds to the severity of the injury
• A study of 57 children and adolescents with mild
  to moderate-sever closed head injury found that
  more than 18 had poor auditory comprehension of
  syntactically complex sentences but only 2 had
  trouble understanding single words.

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Word Retrieval

• Difficulties with word retrieval are frequently
  observed in children with acquired aphasia
• 9 of children with mild-to-moderate were
  hampered in confrontation naming
• 18 had trouble retrieving words in specific
  category
• Few studies have documented lexical difficulties
  with left-sided vascular lesions
• Landau-Kleffner show word substitutions and word
  retrieval problems

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Academic Achievement

• Though many children with acquired aphasia can be
  considered as fully recovered there still can
  be effects on academics
• Even effect intelligence testing
• Next table shows possible effect

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Academic Difficulties for Kids with Severe Head
Injury
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(No Transcript)
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Other Academic Problems

• Limited self-awareness of communication problems,
  which leads to a reluctance or unwillingness to
  work on them
• Difficulty initiating conversation
• General self-evaluations (its okay or its
  all wrong) that do not lead to constructive
  responses