Maintenance and generalization in PPA (Jokel, 2022)
Purpose: Our capacity to engage in society and maintain meaningful relationships is dependent on intact communication skills. They are compromised in a neurodegenerative language disorder termed primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Behavioral interventions for PPA are sparse and often limited to impairment-based approaches or communication skills training, although various functional interventions have been also described. The slow but relentless language decline does not naturally support maintenance and/or generalization of treatment gains, which should be the ultimate goal of any therapy. However, in some cases and under certain conditions, maintenance and generalization may be accomplished. While each type of intervention has much to offer to the PPA population, the clinical and research realms can benefit from a collective professional discussion on aspects of intervention conducive to maintenance and/or generalization of treatment gains in PPA. Such a discussion took place at the 2021 Clinical Aphasiology Conference during two roundtable sessions. The aims of the sessions were to review the premises of successful treatment approaches in PPA and to discuss factors fostering or inhibiting maintenance and generalization in PPA.
Conclusions: Current literature delivers, albeit in small doses, encouraging evidence for clinicians providing language intervention to patients with PPA. Although PPA is a progressive disorder, both the immediate treatment effects and, in many cases, evidence of maintenance and generalization demonstrate that improvements may be long lasting and transferrable. Several factors may enhance maintenance and generalization effects, including repeated practice, working with multiple exemplars of treatment items, booster sessions, group programs with built-in individual sessions, spared semantics, and personal relevance, to name a few. With this evidence in hand, we need to become more diligent about measuring and reporting clinical outcomes and delivering interventions that support maintenance and generalization of therapeutic gains beyond the clinician’s office.
Supplemental Material S1. Selected studies with reported maintenance and/or generalization of treatment for PPA.
Jokel, R. (2022). Maintenance and generalization of lexical items in primary progressive aphasia: Reflections from the roundtable discussion at the 2021 Clinical Aphasiology Conference. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_AJSLP-21-00275
Publisher Note: This article is part of the Special Issue: Select Papers From the 50th Clinical Aphasiology Conference.
