Older adults may lose the ability to speak or understand language due to stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or other brain-damaging conditions, a condition called aphasia. The severity of aphasia varies from person to person, but even mild impairments can affect mood in older patients. People with aphasia often feel isolated and even depressed due to their inability to articulate their emotions and needs. Therefore, family members and caregivers of patients with aphasia should learn scientific communication skills, give patients enough love and patience, and provide high-quality companionship. Often, people feel kindness and love even when they have lost their language skills.
Why Aphasia
Language ability is one of the most basic differences between humans and other animals, and language is an indispensable communication tool in people’s daily life. There is a “high command” in the human cerebral cortex – the language center, which is the physiological basis for listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
But with age, many diseases may affect the language center, causing this “high command” to malfunction, resulting in various types of aphasia. The main causes of aphasia in the elderly include Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, brain tumor, intracranial infection and other systemic diseases that can directly or indirectly affect the language center of the cerebral cortex. Elderly people often coexist with multiple diseases. Some elderly people suffer from aphasia, which is caused by two or even multiple reasons, such as Alzheimer’s disease and cerebrovascular disease.
Elderly people suffering from aphasia should receive a comprehensive and systematic examination, find out the cause, intervene, and perform language rehabilitation as soon as possible.
Easy to produce negative emotions
As the most important way to communicate with the outside world, the loss of language function has a very obvious impact on the elderly, specifically related to aphasia. type and severity. Aphasia is classified into motor aphasia, sensory aphasia, conductive aphasia, nomenclature aphasia, and mixed aphasia according to the patient’s inability to hear, speak, repeat other people’s words, and name common objects. .
It is conceivable that no matter what type of language barrier it is, it will affect the transmission of information between patients and others. Patients are prone to anxiety, anger, depression, pessimism and other negative emotions, and social activities are less and less, even Impaired self-care ability. Aphasia not only brings pain to the patient, but also increases the burden on the patient’s relatives and friends. Family members should take the elderly with aphasia to seek medical treatment in a timely manner, actively treat and recover, and avoid or minimize the occurrence of sequelae and accidental injuries. Once a patient is found to be depressed, self-injured, or suicidal, they should seek professional medical treatment as soon as possible.
Communication skills
Communication is the biggest difficulty in caring for the elderly with aphasia. Personalized strategy.
1. Listen patiently If the elderly patient can understand, but the expression is not fluent, give him sufficient time. During the conversation, the caregiver can smile or nod in encouragement, or repeat the older person’s words and observe their reaction. Caregivers should never urge older patients, refrain from criticizing or speaking negatively, lest older adults become increasingly afraid to speak.
2. Slow down the speed of speech If the elderly patient has difficulty understanding and cannot understand large and fast words, the caregiver needs to deliberately slow down the speed of speech, and try to use everyday language and simple sentences. Repeat many times.
3. Use auxiliary tools If the elderly patient can still read and write, the caregiver can prepare paper, pen, clipboard, etc., and try to communicate with the patient in words.
4. Use other non-verbal forms of communication For elderly patients with severely impaired language function, caregivers should make full use of expressions, gestures, realistic scenes and other non-verbal forms to communicate information and emotions.