Telerehabilitation for Aphasia (TERRA)
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseNot applicable
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age21-80
SponsorUniversity of South Carolina
About this trial
Speech-language therapy is generally found to be helpful in the rehabilitation of aphasia. However, not all patients with aphasia have access to adequate treatment to maximize their recovery. The goal of this project is to compare the efficacy of telerehabilitation or Aphasia Remote Therapy (ART) to the more traditional In-Clinic Therapy (I-CT).
Eligibility criteria
This trial does not accept healthy volunteersQualifiers
Participants must have sustained a left hemisphere ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke at least 12 months prior to enrollment.
Participants must primarily speak English for at least the past 20 years.
Participants must be capable of giving informed consent or indicating another to provide informed consent.
Participants must be between 21-80 years of age.
Disqualifiers
Participants must not have previous neurological disease affecting the brain (e.g. history of traumatic brain injury).
Participants must not have severely limited speech production (severe unintelligibility) and/or auditory comprehension that interferes with adequate participation in the therapy provided (i.e., WAB-R Spontaneous Speech rating scale score of 0-1 or WAB-R Comprehension score of 0-1).
Participants must not have a history of stroke to the right hemisphere of the brain.
Participants must not have a bilateral, cerebellar or brainstem stroke.
Trial design
Design model
Parallel
Treatments tested in this trial
Semantically-focused therapy tasks
Behavioral1\) Semantic feature analysis (SFA; Boyle \& Coelho, 1995; Boyle, 2004). For each pictured stimulus the participant is prompted to name the picture. Then, s/he is encouraged to produce semantically related words that represent features similar to the target word. 2) Semantic barrier task. This approach includes features of the Promoting Aphasics' Communication Effectiveness (PACE; Davis \& Wilcox,1985). The goal of the task is for one participant (e.g., person with aphasia) to describe each card so that the other participant (e.g., clinician) can guess the picture on the card. 3) Verb network strengthening therapy (VNeST; Edmonds et al., 2009; 2014) targets lexical retrieval of verbs and their thematic nouns. The objective of VNeST is for the participant to generate verb-noun associates with the purpose of strengthening the connections between the verb and its thematic roles.
Phonologically-focused therapy tasks
Behavioral1\) Phonological components analysis task (PCA; Leonard et al., 2008). The participant first attempts to name a given picture and then to identify the phonological features of the target words. 2) Phonological production task focuses on the identification of phonological features of targeted, imageable nouns and verbs. It requires the participant to sort picture stimuli based on the number of syllables and then to identify a hierarchy of phonological features. Once each targeted feature is identified for the pair of words, the participant is required to blend the syllables/sounds together. 3) Phonological judgment task relies on computerized presentation of verbs and nouns where participants are required to judge whether pairs of words include similar phonological features (e.g. # of syllables, initial phonemes, final phonemes, rhyming).
Treatment groups
100 Participants
are divided into 2 treatment groupsGroup A: Aphasia Remote Therapy (ART)Experimental treatment 2 interventions
Group B: In-Clinic Therapy (I-CT)Active comparator 2 interventions
Trial outcomes
Primary outcomes
1
Speech Production Outcome Score (SPOTS)
A composite measure of naming (items correct on the Philadelphia Naming Test (PNT; Roach et al., 1996) and discourse words per minute (WPM)
Time frame
Compare baseline score to 6 month follow-up (after treatment) score.Secondary outcomes
1
Improvement in overall aphasia severity
As measured by the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R; Kertesz, 2007)
Time frame
Compare baseline score to 6 month follow-up (after treatment) score.2
Improvement in quality of life
As measured by the Stroke Aphasia Quality of Life Scale-39 (SAQOL-39; Hilari et al., 2003)
Time frame
Compare baseline score to 6 month follow-up (after treatment) score.Sponsors and contacts
Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.
University of South Carolina
Lead sponsor
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Collaborator
Medical University of South Carolina
Collaborator
Source ClinicalTrials.gov