Preliminary findings in a study of age, linguistic evolution and quality of life in recovery from aphasia.

Age has been reported as both a decisive and weak variable in recovery from aphasia. A middle aged group of aphasic subjects (50-64) are compared with an older group (65-80) on linguistic task performance, functional communication and quality of life measures administered at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months post stroke. Preliminary findings do not suggest any age based recovery discrepancies for middle aged versus older aphasic subjects on these measures in the first post stroke year. An hierarchical pattern of severity across aphasia type emerged, with fluent aphasic subjects being the least and global aphasia subjects the most impaired both at the beginning and end of the first post stroke year. There appear to be differences in the schedule of improvement on different measures, which remain to be confirmed in the final analysis of the data.