Case Study - Moderate Broca’s Aphasia


Case Study

Moderate Broca's Aphasia (brain injury)

Age: 27

Time since brain injury: 3 years


Problems

Kay sustained a severe traumatic brain injury and stroke from a motor vehicle accident. She was almost done with college and wanted to start a career.

Kay’s stroke and TBI left her with significant difficulty speaking in sentences, using correct verb tenses, and word-finding. She knew when she was having trouble, but did not have good strategies to help herself.

Assessment

Using The Aphasia Center's testing protocols
  • Relatively good comprehension in context
  • Sentence-level reading
  • Good awareness of deficits and breakdowns
  • Difficulty finding specific words in conversation
  • Limited ability to write single words
  • Speech was mostly single nouns

Treatment

She completed a 8-week program with tDCS

and My Aphasia Coach software homework daily.


Results

Before
After
Speech Fluency
50%
90%
Repetition
54%
77%
Writing
13%
51%

Outcome

  • Learned a wider variety of strategies to help during breakdowns
  • Began speaking in grammatical sentences of 4+ words independently
  • Learned how to use her phone as a strategy
  • Self-correcting errors in verb tense and grammatical structure
  • Improved ability to accurately write longer words and sentences