The news came like thunder from a clear sky. Moreover, until recently Bruce Willis was working on several new films, some of which are even due out this year. Now his family has announced that the Hollywood star will not be photographed again due to aphasia. Thus, at the age of 67, Bruce Willis ended his career.
“Our beloved Bruce has some health problems – he was recently diagnosed with aphasia, which impairs his cognitive abilities. As a result, and after careful discussion, Bruce ends his career, which means so much to him,” the family said in a statement. mu.
Anyone can develop aphasia
Acquired speech disorders can occur as a result of damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. This most often occurs after a stroke. But aphasia can also be caused by cerebral hemorrhage, brain tumor, inflammation or traumatic brain injury, for example after an accident. Then, literally from today to tomorrow, one can lose the ability to express oneself in words. Sudden loss of speech affects all language skills: speaking and understanding, reading and writing. But aphasia is “only” a disorder of speech, not of thinking. Which means that human thought processes and intellectual abilities are either not affected at all or to a very small extent. Therefore, those affected by the disease and their relatives find themselves in an extremely difficult situation: the patient is unable to name even the simplest things from his workday. He understands everything, but he can’t express himself – he just misses the words.
Four types of aphasia
Anomie (amnestic aphasia) is the mildest form of the disease. In it, the patient has difficulty finding the appropriate words when naming objects, for example. He tries to overcome this speech disorder by describing the words he is looking for. Other patients begin to speak in telegraph style, often in very short and simple sentences. Or they accumulate keywords that link one after the other. They suffer from Brock’s aphasia. Their speech is delayed due to the search for the right words, but in general the people around them understand relatively well what the sufferer of this form of speech disorder wants to say.
The opposite is true of people suffering from Wernicke’s so-called aphasia: they form very long and complex sentences in which individual passages are repeated. Apparently the sufferer of this form of aphasia speaks fluently, but finds it difficult to find the right words and often what he says makes no sense. Accordingly, it is difficult to understand what he wants to communicate. People suffering from global aphasia usually express themselves in single words or constantly repeat memorized phrases. In this most severe form of aphasia, it is almost impossible to understand what the patient is saying.
Is there therapy?
Acquired speech impairment is not an irreversible process, but it requires a lot of training and long-term language therapy, which aims to teach the affected person to speak and even write again. Especially in people after a first stroke, normalization is possible: in one third of these cases, patients are able to largely restore their speech skills in the first four weeks. After that, however, as time went on, it became more and more difficult to regain language skills.
Author: Alexander Freund
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Grade 2.7 from 6 voice.
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