By Dr Anna Volkmer (UCL)

Why this matters?

Sometimes, people get an illness called dementia, which can make it harder to use language. This means they might find speaking, understanding, reading, or writing difficult. When these language problems slowly get worse over time, it’s called progressive aphasia (PPA). There isn’t much easy-to-understand information about progressive aphasia, and many people say this is one of the most frustrating parts of their illness.

Why does this matter? Firstly, speech and language therapy has the potential to reduce the risk of negative mental health outcomes for people with PPA and their families and keep people at home for longer. Secondly, what we know about speech and language therapy for PPA is relevant to people with all kinds of dementia as communication difficulties are common across dementias.

What’s new or interesting?

We have designed a programme of work to increase awareness of speech and language therapy for PPA. This includes an International PPA awareness day. We have been hosting the awareness day for two years now and this year events were health across 15 countries around the world. We want to increase awareness amongst the public, but also with the health professions, so that people with PPA can be promptly referred on to speech and language therapy and fully benefit from the range of interventions available to support people to maintain conversations and connections. You can see the webinars on our website and check out the work we do in our International SLT/P PPA Network here.

What happens next?

We have been working with people with PPA and their families to provide more therapy AND more training on PPA for speech and language therapy students across the UK. Our SPIN-D funding has helped us establish a national university speech and language therapy clinic for people with PPA and their family members, staffed by student speech and language therapists. The students are supervised by an experienced speech and language therapist. The clinic is hybrid, so that people can attend via video conferencing or in person. We mainly offer group therapy, not often available in the NHS. We are measuring the benefits of the clinic for people with PPA and their families’ using measures of communication and quality of life. We are also asking patients, their families and students about how the clinic helps. Watch this space to see how the work unfolds!