What does the data tell us about the benefits of communication interventions for the mood of adults with aphasia? a literature review

Introduction and Rationale Aphasia is an acquired multimodality language problem that impacts on the lives of people who are diagnosed with it. Alongside communication difficulties, people with aphasia may experience problem with well-being, social satisfaction, social participation and quality of life. Northcott et al. (2016) and Cruice et al. (2005) suggest that the psychological wellbeing of people with aphasia is an important consideration if intervention is seen within the context of the life of the person with aphasia and those that live with them.

Aims of the Study This project was conducted as part of an undergraduate BSc (Hons) Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) degree programme and was designed to investigate the evidence base for any indications that aphasia therapy can influence the mood of those being provided with aphasia therapy.

Methods Used An electronic literature search was conducted using the key terms aphasia, intervention, mood and adults. The data bases used for the search were Academic Search Premiered, APA Psych articles, APA Psych info, CINAHL Plus with Full Text, MEDLINE, PubMed and Scopus. The inclusion criteria were that research projects had studied a form of aphasia intervention, participants had a diagnosis of aphasia, and were over 18 years of age, mood was used as part of an outcome measurement and the abstract was available in English. Exclusion criteria included people with neurodegenerative disease, studies that did not measure mood and assessment only studies.

Results The initial database search generated a total of 1,149 articles. Once filters were applied to the database search, it reduced the amount to 734 articles. All titles and abstract were reviewed and after inclusion and exclusion criteria had been applied, this resulted in 10 studies.

Conclusions The review suggested that some interventions may benefit the mood of adults with aphasia and these techniques were intensive language action therapy (Berthier et al., 2020; Mohr et al., 2017), solution focussed therapy (Northcutt et al., 2016), technology enhanced delivery of conversation partner interventions (Cruice et al., 2020; Giachero et al., 2020), drama therapy (Cherney et al., 2011) and biographical narrative intervention (Corsten et al., 2015). The seven studies that showed improvements in the mood of people with aphasia varied in several important ways. They not only provided different interventions, they were delivered by professionals with varying levels of skills, there were differences in duration and intensity of interventions, studies also used different outcome measures, and used different research designs. These multiple differences highlight how difficult it is to compare the effectiveness of different types of interventions.

Implications for practise SLTs have traditionally focused on strengthening linguistic and cognitive functioning of adults with aphasia, the results of this literature review suggest that aphasia therapy may also have a beneficial impact on the mood of people with aphasia. It is difficult to generalise the results of this review because of the methodological differences identified during analysis, what is evident however is that further research is required to understand how SLT might impact positively on the mood of those living with aphasia.