Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) faculty published a study on Sept. 8 that deepened scientists’ understanding of the brain’s role in language recovery for stroke patients.
Dr. Peter Turkeltaub (MED ’05), director of GUMC’s Cognitive Recovery Lab, authored the study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Turkeltaub and the lab discovered that when the language processing area in the brain’s left hemisphere is damaged by a stroke — which commonly causes aphasia, the inability to understand or produce speech — the right hemisphere can become more dominant in the use of language.
Turkeltaub said the study’s findings weren’t unexpected, as doctors have discussed since the 19th century the possibility of the right hemisphere picking up the functions of a damaged left hemisphere.
“One of the very common outcomes from a stroke is aphasia, which is a loss of language and communication ability that almost always occurs because of damage to the left side of the brain, which is the one that we use for language mostly,” Turkeltaub told The Hoya. “So there’s been a question that people have been asking since the 1800s, actually, about whether when you have damage to the left hemisphere and it causes language problems, you can use the similar areas of the right hemisphere to support recovery.”
Turkeltaub said his lab addressed this debate and found that the right brain, in certain patients, is able to help mitigate the left brain’s deficiencies after a stroke.
“What we found is that there is some plasticity in the right hemisphere that some people do use to support language after they have a stroke on the left side of the brain,” Turkeltaub said. “And there are different patterns that we see that suggest different types of brain plasticity account for those changes. So now we can say something about who’s likely to use their right hemisphere for stroke after stroke.”
Turketaub added that, while promising for recovery, the right brain’s ability to accomplish this is dependent on the patient and their background.
“Now we can say something about who’s likely to use their right hemisphere after a stroke,” Turkelbaum said. “Younger people, left-handed people, people with higher education and people with strokes in certain parts of the left hemisphere. And so that information will be useful, we think, for developing treatments that aim to boost right hemisphere activity to help with recovery.”
Andrew DeMarco — one of the other main authors of the study and the director of the DeMarco Advanced Research in Neurorehabilitation (DARN) Lab — said this research is critical for helping doctors develop new, more effective treatments for patients.
“The doctor needs to understand how to make decisions about diagnostics and treatment,” DeMarco told The Hoya. “You don’t want that to be creative, you don’t want that to be risk-taking. In research, we kind of turn that equation on its head. We’re trying to think creatively and break the things that doctors do or try to innovate the things that doctors do.”
Naama Ben-Dor (CAS ’26), a pre-medical neurobiology major, said she believes studies such as this one are more helpful to patients than attempts at prevention.
“Strokes have various causes and it seems to me that prevention, while important, might be unrealistic in most cases,” Ben-Dor wrote to The Hoya. “As such, research on treatments and recovery might succeed in helping the most patients.”
DeMarco warned against falling into “pop science,” the tendency for the public to overestimate a single study’s findings, and said discoveries such as the study’s must be built upon through further research.
“The conclusions drawn from a single study shouldn’t be taken as the end-all be-all,” DeMarco said. “What you want to do is you want to run a series of studies that will accumulate evidence for general ideas. When it comes to the brain and it comes to behavior, very rarely do you have a yes or no, where humans are really complicated, our behaviors are really complicated, and our brains are really complicated.”
To build on this study, Turkeltaub said the lab is now considering different clinical testing methods utilizing this research that could help patients with aphasia.
DeMarco added that the public is often not well informed on aphasia and its effects, so raising awareness is also a very important aspect of the research his lab does.
“For these disabilities, public education is important,” DeMarco said. “Having people know that if somebody is really old and looks like they’re walking with a cane and maybe they’re not talking so good, that might mean that they have aphasia. Just bringing awareness is one of our goals, broadly speaking.”