EVANSTON, Ill. --- Aphasia is a devastating language disorder that essentially robs the brain of language. At 2 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 20, Northwestern University Professor Cynthia Thompson -- one of the world’s leading experts on aphasia – will be on WBEZ 91.5 FM’s Afternoon Shift program to talk and answer questions about this often misunderstood disorder.
Listeners can call WBEZ at (312) 923-9239 with questions and comments about aphasia, research developments, everyday coping strategies and the challenges of living with the disorder that most often is the result of stroke or brain injury but is also associated with progressive neurological disease. Those out of the station’s FM range can stream the show live by clicking the “listen live” button online.
Carolyn Goffman, whose husband has had aphasia for seven years, and Belma Hadziselimovic, a clinician at Northwestern’s Speech, Language and Learning Clinic who works with the Goffman family, will join Thompson in the discussion and Q-and-A. WBEZ’s Niala Boodhoo will host.
“Although a million people in the U.S. -- one in 250 -- live with aphasia, it is a little known the School of Communication. “People often only learn about it once they have it or know someone who does.”
In groundbreaking research, Thompson has shown that the brain has the capacity to recover many years following stroke and not only in the first months after a stroke’s onset. As director of the NIH-supported Center for the Neurobiology of Language Recovery at Northwestern, she is collaborating with the best researchers in the field to discover biomarkers that can predict language recovery.
For more about aphasia and aphasia services, contact Northwestern’s Evanston-based Speech, Language and Learning Clinic at (847) 491-5012 or the Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Laboratory at (847) 467-7491. To have questions answered on the WBEZ program, call (312) 923-9239.