speech-language report for patient with dementia

Does dementia affect speech and language?

It is well known that dementia affects speech and language. Indeed, one of the symptoms of dementia may be communication problems. The condition can develop slowly or be brought on, for instance, by a stroke. Dementia is not a normal part of ageing, or inevitable as we grow older, but it mainly affects elderly people.

Can speech-language pathologists assess and treat individuals with dementia?

Speech-language pathologists’ perspectiveson assessment and treatment of individuals with dementia: An extended review. Undergraduate Research Spring Fair, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Are textbooks useful for assessment of speech pathology and dementia?

field of speech pathology and dementia. Authoritative sources (i.e., textbooks) were utilized to better understand the key components of assessment, which may be better summarized in textbooks than in assessment research articles.

How can SLPs ensure reimbursement for speech-language therapy for patients with dementia?

Persons with dementia use AAC successfully, and SLPs may want to demonstrate to patients and caregivers the effectiveness of these tools. To ensure reimbursement, goals and progress notes should reflect how speech-language treatment helps the patient to be more functional.

How would you describe a dementia speech?

The main characteristics of speech and language in people with Alzheimer's dementia include: difficulties in finding words for objects, difficulties with naming, understanding difficulties, and a louder voice when speaking.

What are three communication deficits or characteristics associated with dementia?

The role of the SLP is to assess cognitive-communication deficits related to dementia (e.g., memory problems; disorientation to time, place, and person; difficulty with language comprehension and expression) and to identify cultural, linguistic, and environmental influences that have an impact on functioning.

What does a speech therapist do for dementia patients?

Speech Therapy Treatment for Dementia It helps stimulate cognitive ability through activities related to the underlying cognitive domain. Individuals working with a speech pathologist learn how to compensate for their deficits. They learn to modify their environment, which is crucial.

Can an SLP diagnose dementia?

SLPs cannot diagnose a patient with dementia. If the patient is far enough into the disease process, the medical doctor may determine that the patient cannot safely make decisions for themselves.

How does dementia affect speech and language?

Persons living with dementia experience changes in the brain's temporal lobe that affect their ability to process language. Even in the disease's early stages, caregivers may notice a decline in formal language (vocabulary, comprehension, and speech production), which all humans rely upon to communicate verbally.

What are 6 communication techniques you should use when communicating with a person with dementia?

Top communication tools for seniors with dementiaLimit potential distractions. ... Speak naturally and use gestures. ... Use your name and others' names. ... Talk about one thing at a time. ... Use nonverbal cues. ... Avoid overwhelming questions. ... Be creative. ... Be patient and avoid jumping in.More items...•

In what ways can the SLP impact the lives of a person with dementia and their family?

The SLP also can work with a person with dementia to make sure they can eat safely. This may include eating different types of foods or eating in different ways. Family members and caregivers can support the person with dementia to make sure they eat enough.

What is cognitive speech therapy?

However, cognitive speech therapy isn't just for individuals who may have difficulty speaking, this type of therapy works on a variety of skills. These include target language, swallowing, and cognition. Developing upon these areas, especially cognition, can help improve overall independence.

Do speech therapists help with memory?

Speech therapy can work to address memory and other cognitive deficits. Therapy can help to stimulate parts of the brain and aid in improving speech as well as improving information retention.

Is dementia a cognitive communication disorder?

Dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) is a major cognitive communication disorder.

What are the primary goals of care for a client with dementia?

Some of the goals identified are generally applicable for dementia patients and their caregivers: low caregiver strain, management of behavioral symptoms, avoidance of pain and depression, as much functional independence as possible, and eventually dying with dignity.

Does Medicare cover speech therapy for dementia patients?

National and local Medicare policy statements clearly support coverage of cognitive therapy services provided by speech-language pathologists.

How to help dementia patients with speech?

Experienced carers of patients whose speech is affected by dementia are sensitive to their needs and listen actively. They encourage patients with smiles and gestures, ensure there are no distractions, and talk in a warm and calm voice. In addition, they talk about one thing at time and use simple language or pictures to get their message across. They refer to people by using their name, and the key thing is to show empathy and understanding.

How can speech therapy help dementia patients?

Speech therapy specialists can help slow down the degenerative process and keep people talking for longer. Early speech therapy intervention can make a huge difference to quality of life for dementia sufferers. It can help them stay independent and feel better in themselves. Speech and language problems among dementia sufferers will vary ...

Why is it important to have speech therapy?

Research suggests that social isolation can cause dementia symptoms to progress more rapidly. So do have your speech therapy to help prevent dementia from affecting your speech and language.

What is the role of speech therapists in dementia?

Speech therapists are a key part of the multidisciplinary team providing care to speech-affected dementia patients.

Can dementia cause speech problems?

This condition may affect a person’s ability to speak normally. Speech problems can be caused by physical difficulties in speaking—problems with the muscles that allow us to form speech. Alternatively, dementia may affect comprehension.

Does dementia affect language?

It is well known that dementia affects speech and language. Indeed, one of the symptoms of dementia may be communication problems. The condition can develop slowly or be brought on, for instance, by a stroke. Dementia is not a normal part of ageing, or inevitable as we grow older, but it mainly affects elderly people.

What Type Of Dementia Affects Speech?

There’s a reason that not all dementia patients end up with reduced speech or no speaking abilities at all by the end of the disease process. Different types of dementia affect different cognitive areas.

What Does A Speech Therapist Do For Dementia Patients?

As a child, you might have received speech therapy to help you overcome a lisp or other common mispronunciation issues. Speech therapy for someone with cognitive deficits is different, as it’s a lot more advanced and doesn’t only affect physical speech.

Does Speech Therapy Help Dementia Patients?

What if you are strongly considering speech therapy for your senior with dementia, but you’re not completely sure yet? How do you know rehabilitation services like this will even work?

Does Medicare Cover Speech Therapy For Dementia Patients?

Okay, so you’re ready to begin looking for an SLP for your senior with dementia. Before you do though, you’re curious who’s going to foot the bill for their speech therapy. Does Medicare cover it (or other dementia testing) or will you have to pay out-of-pocket?

Why do people with dementia have problems with language?

A person with any type of dementia can have problems with language. This is because dementia can damage the parts of the brain that control language. How and when language problems develop will depend on: their personality and the ways they manage these language problems. the stage the dementia is at.

How does dementia affect communication?

What else can affect how well a person with dementia can communicate? Communication for a person with dementia can be affected by pain, discomfort, illness or the side effects of medication. If you notice a sudden change in the person (over hours or days), it could be delirium, which is a medical emergency.

How does dementia affect the way people think?

Following a conversation. Dementia affects the way a person thinks, which can impact on their ability to respond appropriately or follow a conversation. This could be because they: do not understand what you have said . are not able to keep focused. are thinking more slowly.

What is the form called for dementia?

Alzheimer’s Society produces a simple form called ‘This is me ’ to help record personal information about a person. This includes how they like to communicate, any difficulties they have, ...

How to not be able to find the right words?

not be able to find the right words. use a related word (for example, ‘book’ instead of ‘newspaper’) use substitutes for words (for example, ‘thing that you sit on’ instead of ‘chair’) not find any word at all. not struggle to find words, but use words that have no meaning, or that are jumbled up in the wrong order.

Can you no longer communicate?

There may eventually come a time when the person can no longer communicate as they once did . This can be distressing and frustrating for them and those supporting them, but there are ways to keep communicating. For example, the person may be able to express themselves through body language and other non-verbal ways.

Can dementia make you worse?

They can be made worse if the person is tired, in pain or unwell. The surroundings can also help with communication, or make it more difficult. In some types of dementia – such as some forms of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) – a person may start to have problems with language much earlier than other types of dementia.

What are the language deficits in dementia?

Language deficits are frequent in dementia: Patients with dementia demonstrate, among other signs, word-finding problems (anomia), sentence comprehension deficits, and lack of cohesion in discourse. Unlike aphasias that are due to focal brain damage, language deficits in dementia occur in the context of multiple cognitive impairments.

What are the lexical impairments of DAT?

Lexical impairments in DAT have been studied for decades (e.g., Aronoff et al., 2006; Irigaray, 1967; Kempler, 1988). Patients with DAT have trouble recalling names and other words, often substituting pro-forms (e.g., “he,” “it”), using conceptually related words (e.g., “dog” for “horse”), or pausing when they cannot generate a target word in conversation or in structured tasks. Anomia, at least in spontaneous speech and simple picture-naming tasks, could be due to extralinguistic deficits or a deterioration of the underlying semantic/conceptual system. Extralinguistic deficits can include inattention to the task, forgetting the target word, or being distracted by related competitor responses. A semantic/conceptual impairment, defined as a loss of underlying semantic memories, would be manifested in lexical production, as well as any other task that relies on that meaning, including comprehension, knowledge of category relationships, attributes, and the like.

What are the different types of dementia?

We first review relevant data from three dementia syndromes: dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and two variants of frontotemporal dementia (FTD): semantic dementia (SD) and primary progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA). These 2 KEMPLER AND GORAL three syndromes can be distinguished by their impairment patterns and distribution of neuropathology. DAT is characterized by a progressive deterioration of memory and at least two other cognitive domains (such as language, visuospatial perception, executive function). The neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease involves regions throughout the brain, particularly the hippocampus and areas in the frontal cortex (Kempler, 2005; Mendez & Cummings, 2003). Two varieties of FTD are distinguished from other dementia syndromes by their marked language impairments.1One FTD variant, SD, is characterized by fluent speech output accompanied by anomia and comprehension impairments. The neuropathology of SD appears to be primarily temporal in distribution. SD can be clinically confused with DAT in those patients with DAT who show relatively early and circumscribed language impairment. Another FTD variant, PNFA, is characterized by nonfluent speech output and anomia alongside relatively preserved comprehension. The neuropathology of PNFA appears to be frontal in distribution. PNFA, due to the nonfluent speech output is rarely confused with the symptomatology of DAT. Although these two FTD syndromes are described as distinct, there are patients who demonstrate a mixed pattern with symptoms of both SD and PNFA (Grossman & Ash, 2004; Kempler, et al., 1990; Kertesz, Davidson, McCabe, Takagi, & Munoz, 2003; Mesulam, 1982; Rogalski & Mesulam 2007).

Which two factors contribute to the sentence processing deficits of PNFA?

Morphosyntactic and Extralinguistic Impairments Both Contribute to Sentence Processing Deficits of PNFA

Can sentence comprehension be impaired?

Sentence comprehension can appear impaired in offline tasks that involve listening to and remembering instructions while selecting one of several choices in a response array or responding to information questions about the material presented (Kempler, Almor, Tyler, Andersen, & MacDonald, 1998; Rochon, Waters, & Caplan, 2000). The fact that patients with DAT do not show effects of syntactic complexity and that their performance correlates with measures of working memory have led authors to conclude that sentence comprehension impairments can be attributed to extralinguistic deficits in executive function (e.g., working memory). If offline sentence comprehension deficits are due to memory impairment, performance on online comprehension tasks, which minimize extralinguistic task demands, should be intact. Indeed, Almor, MacDonald, Kempler, Andersen, and Tyler (2001)demonstrated in an online cross-modal naming paradigm that patients with DAT performed similarly to healthy elderly in processing subject-verb agreement. Small, Andersen, and Kempler (1997)showed that speech rate alteration can modulate sentence comprehension for patients with DAT, suggesting, again that extralinguistic factors can play a significant role in sentence processing for this population. Consistent with these data, Kavé and Levy (2003)demonstrated in both online and offline tasks that participants with DAT, like healthy controls, were sensitive to violations of tense and person. Taken together, these data suggest that grammatical processing may be grossly intact in DAT, at least with respect to relatively simple and robust grammatical phenomena (e.g., subject-verb agreement).

Is visual feature information disproportionately affected in SD?

It should be mentioned that there are data that suggest the semantic/conceptual deficit in SD may not be as pervasive or as general as just stated. Several authors have proposed that visual feature information is disproportionately affected in SD. This would explain patients' inability to make judgments with regard to categories that crucially rely on perceptual information (e.g., fruits and vegetables) and their relatively preserved abilities to do so with categories that rely less on perceptual distinctions (e.g., numbers and other abstract concepts) (e.g., Crutch & Warrington, 2006; Halpern et al., 2004; Vesely, Bonner, Reilly, & Grossman, 2007).

Does loss of semantic features interfere with performance?

Early on in the process, the loss of semantic features is minimal and does not interfere with performance on a wide range of semantic tasks (e.g., word comprehension and definition, similarity judgment, priming). At this point, memory and attention are often moderately impaired and do interfere with task performance.

What is dementia speech?

In conclusion, dementia refers to a progressive condition in which a variety of symptoms exist, including: memory loss, expressive language impairments, impaired communication, ability to reason, mood, and personality (Alzheimer’s Society, 2013). Speech language pathologists play an essential role in treatment of dementia. It is essential to communicate, support, and advocate for patients who suffer from dementia (Butcher, 2018.)

What is the role of speech pathology in dementia?

It has been reported by speech-language pathologists that the knowledge they possess to aid in treatment of patients with dementia is underutilized. Other health professions do not recognize the wealth of knowledge that a speech-language pathologist possesses (Swan et al., 2018). It is up to the professionals of speech-language pathology to utilize evidence based practice and provide sufficient data that supports functional communication growth following treatment by a speech-language pathologist.

How does dementia affect communication?

Each type of dementia presents with varying degrees of communication deficits. These deficits can be in the areas of expressive or receptive language, voice fluency, or the social use of language, which is referred to as pragmatics. These deficits can advance to a point in which the patient loses all functional communication abilities (Woodard, 2013). This can negatively impact the patient’s quality of life and escalate the burden that caregivers often undertake. Responsive behaviors such as violent behavior, foul language, and repetitive questioning may be a result of the frustration caused from losing the ability to functionally communicate (Savundranayagam, Hummert, & Montgomery, 2005). As the dementia progresses in severity, these responsive behaviors can increase. Treatment from a speech-language pathologist can prove very beneficial in treatment for dementia patients.

Is dementia a disease?

The term dementia refers to an umbrella term that describes conditions that affect several aspects of cognition due to neurons in the brain (Alzheimer’s Association, 2014). Specifically, dementia refers to a progressive condition in which a variety of symptoms exist, including: memory loss, expressive language impairments, impaired communication, ability to reason, mood, and personality (Alzheimer’s Society, 2013). It is a major health concern for the population affected (Fredriksen-Goldsen, Jen, Bryan & Goldsen, 2018). Alzheimer’s is the most commonly seen type of dementia, with the estimation of prevalence being 5.4 million Americans (Alzheimer’s Association, 2016). Globally, the estimated prevalence is 35.6 million, with the population of patients expected to double every 20 years (Prince et al., 2013). Currently, there is no cure for dementia (Livingston and Frankish, 2015).

How to communicate with a person with dementia?

The Alzheimer’s Association Sugden-Best suggests strategies to promote effective communication with a person with dementia (10): Always access the person with dementia from the front; Make sure you look at a person when you talk to him or her; Give the person some signs, as touching hand, or use the person’s name before you start the conversation; Ensure that the environment is calm and free of disturbance; Use simple language and speak slowly ; Use short and simple sentences; Talk to a person with dementia as an adult and do not speak in the presence of a person as if he or she is not present; Give enough time to process information and to respond; Try to let the person with dementia to complete their thoughts and make choices with the words; Avoid guessing what the person with dementia is trying to say; Encourage an individual to write a word that he or she is trying to express and to at loud; It might be useful to use a pictogram that uses image views; A person with dementia can be useful to “fill in” answers to questions such as “I need” or “I want” just by showing the appropriate picture; Use proper facial expressions, sometimes it may seem exaggerated, for example to smile when talking about happy events, but do it; Do not correct the person with dementia if he or she is making mistakes; Do not stress the person with dementia to respond; Encourage an individual to use any way of communication he or she feels comfortable with, for example, gesture or writing; Use touch to help concentrate, to set up another way of communication and offer security and encouragement; Avoid confrontation and conflicts with people with dementia.

What are the symptoms of dementia?

Difficulties in area of language are a common symptom in people with dementia. Those communication difficulties are a consequence of nerve cell failure, and person with dementia should not be blamed of the symptoms that arise. People with dementia show lower results in the area of understanding and verbal expression, repetition, reading and writing.

What is dementia in medical terms?

Dementia is a term used to describe a group of brain disorders that have a profound impact on an individual’s life (11) . Currently, the leading cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, vascular disease and Levi’s disease (12).

How many people have dementia at 94?

At age of 90 to 94, 40% of people have dementia, with a prevalence of dementia being 58% among individuals older than 94 (14). Vascular dementia is considered as the second major form of dementia (15), or the other most common form of dementia (16).

How common is dementia in older people?

It is estimated that the prevalence of dementia is about 6% to 10% of persons older than 65 years. Prevalence increases with age, rising from 1% to 2% among those aged 65 to 74 years to 30% or more in those older than 85 years (13). At age of 90 to 94, 40% of people have dementia, with a prevalence of dementia being 58% among individuals older than 94 (14). Vascular dementia is considered as the second major form of dementia (15), or the other most common form of dementia (16). Her frequency is different from dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease, which is 10-20% of cases (15). Some researchers estimate that dementia due to Levi’s disease accounts for 15% to 20% of all cases of dementia (17). It seems that the symptoms associated with dementia distributed over the continuum, affect the health of older adults and deserve intervention (18).

What are the characteristics of vascular dementia?

The main characteristics of speech and language in people with Alzheimer’s dementia include: difficulties in finding words for objects, difficulties with naming, understanding difficulties, and a louder voice when speaking.

What are the causes of dementia?

Dementia represents a diverse category of syndromes that characterize a deficit in memory, cognitive function and behavior (9). Cognitive impairment of people with dementia may limit their ability to communicate effectively (10). Dementia is a term used to describe a group of brain disorders that have a profound impact on an individual’s life (11). Currently, the leading cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, vascular disease and Levi’s disease (12).

How to communicate with a person with dementia?

Communicating with a person with dementia by validating and respecting their feelings.

What is the role of speech pathologist?

The speech-language pathologist has a primary role in the screening, assessment, and treatment of dementia-associated cognitive- communication disorders, including caregiver training and counseling. (ASHA)

Who developed Montessori based programming for dementia?

Montessori Based Programming for Dementia® Developed by Cameron Camp, PhD

How does spaced retrieval help with cognitive deficits?

Spaced retrieval can help people with cognitive deficits learn to retain important information by cementing the information in the procedural memory system. Possible treatment targets include the use of compensatory strategies for swallowing, safe transfer techniques, the names of caregivers, and the use of memory aids (e.g. schedules and calendars). Achievement of these goals can promote independence and reduce anxiety, as well as improve interactions between the client and clinician or caregiver. It’s important to choose memory targets that are personal, functional, and perhaps most importantly, won’t change.