Kessler Foundation. (2015, October 17). Researchers use neuroimaging to explore reading deficits after left stroke: Relating acquired reading impairments to cognitive deficits will lead to targeted rehabilitative interventions. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 30, 2018 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151017152249.htm
Researchers use neuroimaging to explore reading deficits after left stroke
In this article discusses and highlights a study conducted by researchers at the Kessler Foundation and Rutgers University in looking into reading deficits in patients that have suffered left sides strokes. The researches in the study (Olga Boukrina, PhD, Edward Alexander and William Graves, PhD, of Rutgers University, and A.M. Barrett, MD, and Bing Yao, PhD, of Kessler Foundation)wanted to look at neuroimaging of patients with subacuteleft hemispheric strokes during neuropsychological testing and make some sort of connections amongst their deficits and location of their lesions. In the study the researches looked at three main components: orthography, phonology, and semantics. Today in class we learned that these are also main components of language, their visual form, sound, and meaning – activities of the left hemisphere. Thanks to 11 patients, their MRIs and performance on certain tasks the researchers were able to correlate their deficits to their lesion’s locations. An interesting finding was the connection between lesions in the anterior temporal lobe and the mid-fusiform gyrus and a patient’s phonological deficits. These findings are said to help pave an improved way for rehabilitation in stroke patients.
This article seems interesting in that it pertains to the the effects of a left-side stroke, which generally involves the loss of oxygen to the brain, on MRI participants’ language processing and reading abilities. You mentioned that the left hemisphere is most responsible for reading tasks, as it is where visual language, sound, and meaning is processed. It is also interesting that this study was able to hone in on specific sub-structures that are important to different aspects of reading tasks. It makes me wonder what deficits occur in right-hemisphere stroke victims. Since this side of the brain is more activated in certain higher-order processing such as art and music, intuition, and imagination, it would be interesting to find a way to test a right-hemisphere stroke victim’s ability to form abstract thoughts or works of art.
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