NEW YORK (HealthDay News)—Stuttering is a neurological, not a psychological, condition, and scientists in Finland now believe they have found the altered network in the brain that may cause it.
“These findings explain well-known features of stuttering, such as motor difficulties in speech production and significant variability in stuttering severity across emotional states,” said senior study author Juho Joutsa, professor of Neurology at the University of Turku.
The team published the discovery in a recent issue of the journal “Brain.”
According to researchers, between 5 and 10 percent of children will develop stuttering, and 1% of adults also struggle with it. Joe Biden, the president of the United States, has been open about dealing with his stuttering all his life.
“Stuttering was once considered a psychological disorder,” Joutsa recalls. “However, with further research, it is now understood to be a brain disorder related to the regulation of speech production.”
But it is unknown where in the brain the condition might originate.
In the study, Joutsa’s group first focused on 20 adults (aged 45 to 87) who developed stuttering after suffering a stroke. Although the location in the brain where the stroke occurred varied among the patients, in all of them it appeared to affect a particular brain network, unlike those that did not cause stuttering.
These networks connected at specific “node” points in the brain.
Next, Joutsa’s team used MRI to look at the brains of 20 people with non-stroke developmental stuttering. They found that this form of stuttering was associated with the same “nodes.”
A “dose-response” effect was also observed: the greater the structural changes in the ganglia, the greater the severity of stuttering.
All of this points to the fact that stuttering, whatever its trigger, is caused by changes in a specific brain network.
The “nodes” that are crucial in this network are brain structures such as the putamen, amygdala and claustrum, all located deep within the brain, and the connections between them.
“As the main nuclei in the brain, the putamen regulates motor function and the amygdala regulates emotions,” explains Joutsa. “The claustrum, in turn, acts as a ‘node’ for various brain networks and transmits information between them.”
It is hoped that all this will lead to a better understanding of the underlying causes of stuttering, and to new and improved methods of treating it.
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2024-07-23 18:55:07
