Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

This study aimed at clarifing clinical effects of eight-step continuum treatment in a patient who showed apraxia of speech after stroke. The eight-step continuum treatment consisted of 8 steps and its clinical efficacy has been proven with American apraxic patients. However, it has not been clinical...

This study aimed at clarifing clinical effects of eight-step continuum treatment in a patient who showed apraxia of speech after stroke. The eight-step continuum treatment consisted of 8 steps and its clinical efficacy has been proven with American apraxic patients. However, it has not been clinically proven to be effective in Korean patients with apraxia of speech as of yet. Therefore, this study was conducted in an effort to provide preliminary clinical evidence regarding its effectiveness regardless of the linguistic differences between Korean and English. The therapy took place twice a week for 6 months, a total of 48 times. The results showed that the patient's receptive language was improved from 83% to 89% and 37% in accuracy, and expressive language from 15% to 37%. It seemed that spontaneous recovery did not playa role in his improvement since the study was conducted 2 years after the stroke. In addition, the improvement of expressive language was much greater(22%) than that of receptive language(6%), which implied that the therapy was effective in apraxia of speech because apraxia of speech is relatively confined to expressive ability, more specifically motor programming and sequencing.

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