Aphasia Institute
What is Aphasia?
Aphasia is a condition in which an individual has trouble expressing their thoughts and understanding of what has been said. A person who has aphasia may experience difficulty with understanding, speaking, reading, and writing. Intelligence remains intact in aphasia, but the ability to communicate is reduced. According to The National Aphasia Association, it estimates there are 1 million persons living in the United States with aphasia.
What are the causes of Aphasia?
An injury to the brain. Aphasia is most commonly caused by the patient suffering a stroke or as a result of trauma to the head. We classify aphasia into two groups of: fluent aphasia or nonfluent aphasia. Your speech-language pathologist will provide an extensive evaluation that will provide a differential diagnosis and will determine the type of aphasia and the severity of your problem.
Is there any help for the person with Aphasia?
Yes. We believe that we offer a comprehensive aphasia program that can improve your speech, understanding, reading and writing.
How do we do this?
We believe the success of any person to gain back their skills requires practice, practice, practice and time doing what is hard for them…talking, reading, writing, and communicating. Our aphasia program offers an intensive aphasia program of up to 23 hours per week for 6 weeks. An intensive treatment is most often defined as a program that offers at least 9 hours of therapy weekly for a specific number of weeks.
Why does an intensive program work?
Research has shown that an intensive aphasia program leads to greater improvements in communication than more traditional schedules of 2 or 3 hours per week. It is the intensity of the schedule that is the critical component to our success. The more intense the schedule, the greater the gains.
What happens at Vegas Voice Institute?
Patients will begin their program with an overview of the program. Next, you will attend speech therapy in both individual and group therapy led by our speech-language pathologists. You may also attend computer therapy to improve your reading and written language. You will have an opportunity to participate in homework tasks.