Monday, June 04, 2007

New evidence for basal ganglia theory?

Here is a new article published in Brain & Language on new evidence that the basal ganglia is involved in stuttering. Giraud AL, Neumann K, et al. report:

This fMRI study reports a correlation between severity of stuttering and activity in the basal ganglia and shows that this activity is modified by fluency shaping therapy through long-term therapy effects that reflect speech production improvement. A model of dysfunction in stuttering and possible repair modes is proposed that accommodates the data presented here and observations previously made by us and by others.


I write more once I have a copy for the article.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

For what scientists, physicians and speech therapists are still waiting to approach to a consensus on this subject? The evidences of which stuttering is a disturbance of the basal ganglia are already very strong.

Tom Weidig said...

Hi Leo,

I am not convinced yet. More research needs to be done and replicated.

Best wishes,

Tom

Anonymous said...

The problem is that there are disturbances whose clinical characterization is much more recent than the stuttering, e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorder and ADHD, but that, in despite this, already have established medical consensus.

As for the stuttering, the resistance to admit the neurobiology of the disorder is delaying too much getting more efficient therapies.

Why all related stuttering is slower and more controversial?