Noninvasive stimulation of the unlesioned hemisphere and phonological treatment in a case of chronic anomia post-stroke

ABSTRACT

Chronic lexical anomia after left hemisphere (LH) stroke improves under personalized phonological treatment (PT). Cortical linking between language and hand motor areas (hand_M1) questioned whether PT-related improvement relies on the unlesioned hemisphere (UH) plasticity when LH is dysfunctional. Our 70-yo-woman case study showed that 10 sessions of excitatory stimulation of UH_hand-M1 combined with PT hastened oral picture naming improvement as compared to sham+PT and changes were maintained together with changes of untrained items andcorticomotor excitability increase. This supports a role of stimulation-induced plasticity of UH_hand M1 in language recovery, at least in the improvement of lexical anomia in chronic stroke.

KEYWORDS:

• Noninvasive brain stimulation
• unlesioned right hemisphere
• hand motor area
• chronic stroke
• aphasia
• anomia
• language
• rehabilitation
• phonological treatment

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge support from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CS’s equipment, #10071) and the Chronic Pain Network from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - Strategy for Participant-Oriented Research (#358108). NC was supported by master studentships from the Faculty of Medicine (Joseph-Demers, Université Laval) and the Foundation of CHU de Québec.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.

Highlights

• The right (unstroke) hemisphere (UH) could contribute to chronic anomia recovery

• The motor (M1) and language areas are synaptically and functionally linked

• Excitatory stimulation of UH M1 potentiate the effects of a phonological treatment

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation [10071]; Chronic Pain Network from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - Strategy for Participant-Oriented Research [358108].