Rehabilitation of post-stroke aphasia by a single protocol targeting phonological, lexical, and semantic deficits with speech output tasks: a randomized controlled trial.
Elisabetta Banco, Lorenzo Diana, Carlotta Casati and 3 others
PMID 39704642WHAT IT FOUND
2 weeks of PHOLEXSEM improved repetition, naming, fluency and sentence comprehension in people with post-stroke aphasia.
PACE improved only noun fluency and word span. The paper did not compare change between groups.
Key findings
01The PHOLEXSEM group showed significant improvements in word, non-word and sentence repetition, and in repetition on the AAT.
02The PHOLEXSEM group also showed significant improvements in naming nouns and verbs, phonological and semantic fluency, and noun and verb fluency.
03The PACE group showed significant improvements in noun fluency and word span.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The text says 44 persons with aphasia were included, while Table I lists 22 PHOLEXSEM and 21 PACE. The supplied text does not describe how participants were allocated to groups or whether assessors were blinded. The sample size was estimated for a group-by-time interaction, but the final analysis tested change within each group separately. There was no follow-up after the second week, so it is unknown whether gains lasted. The paper reports a significant baseline difference in functional independence, with PHOLEXSEM lower than PACE; the PHOLEXSEM FIM value is given as 40.1±20.98 in the results text and 49.1±21 in Table I. Brain images were available for only 17 of 22 PHOLEXSEM participants. The Discussion proposes caregiver-delivered and online use, but the study did not test those delivery methods.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest with any financial organization. The work was funded by the Italian Ministry of Health - Ricerca Corrente.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that PHOLEXSEM is better than PACE. The study analysed change within each group separately and did not report a direct between-group comparison of change, so superiority over PACE is not established.