Characteristics of basal ganglia aphasia after stroke and the rehabilitative interventions

OBJECTIVE: To introduce the characteristics of basal ganglia aphasia after stroke and the rehabilitative interventions. DATA SOURCES: Articles related to stroke, subcortical aphasia, basal ganglia aphasia and language rehabilitation published in Chinese from January 1988 to December 2005 were searched in Chinese journal full-text database (CJFD) using the Keywords of 'stroke, basal ganglia aphasia, language rehabilitation' in Chinese. Meanwhile, English articles about aphasia published from January 1982 to December 2005 were searched in and Pubmed database. Besides, several books associated with the contents were looked through manually. STUDY SELECTION: The data were checked primarily, the articles about the pathomechanism and neurolinguistic characteristics of basal ganglia aphasia, diagnostic methods of aphasia and language rehabilitation were selected, and those had no obvious relation with the above contents were excluded. Inclusive criteria: literatures explain the clinical characteristics of basal ganglia aphasia, neurolinguistic pathogenesis and methods of rehabilitation therapy in details. The repetitive studies were excluded. DATA EXTRACTION: Totally 95 literatures about basal ganglia aphasia were collected, including 31 about the clinical characteristics of basal ganglia aphasia, 45 about its neurolinguistic pathogenesis, 5 about the evaluation and classification of aphasia, and 14 about its rehabilitation therapy. Thirty accorded with the inclusive criteria were used for review, and the other 65 were excluded. DATA SYNTHESIS: Concisely introduced the definition, past investigation of basal ganglia aphasia after stroke, then dwelled on the multiplicity neurolinguistics characteristics. Aphasia evaluation was dependent upon clinical aphasic symptoms. The relationship between symptom and focus of infection was explored, and the mechanism of pathosis language behavior on basal ganglia aphasia patients was understood to provide consequence data that could authenticate the processing of language in brain. On the other hand, the method of rehabilitation on basal ganglia aphasia after stroke was explained. CONCLUSION: Basal ganglia aphasia is manifested as atypical aphasic symptom, the mechanism for the structure of basal ganglia in the speech formation should be further confirmed. It is effective to select pertinent language rehabilitation for basal ganglia aphasia after stroke.