• Michele Devido Santos, Rubens José Gagliardi, Mac-KayAna Paula Machado GoyanoAPFaculdade de Ciências Médicas, Santa Casa de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil., Paulo Sergio Boggio, Roberta Lianza, and Felipe Fregni.
• Faculdade de Ciências Médicas, Santa Casa de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
• Sao Paulo Med J. 2013 Jan 1; 131 (6): 422426422-6.

Context And ObjectivePrevious animal and human studies have shown that transcranial direct current stimulation can induce significant and lasting neuroplasticity and may improve language recovery in patients with aphasia. The objective of the study was to describe a cohort of patients with aphasia after stroke who were treated with transcranial direct current stimulation.Design And SettingProspective cohort study developed in a public university hospital.MethodsNineteen patients with chronic aphasia received 10 transcranial direct current stimulation sessions lasting 20 minutes each on consecutive days, using a current of 2 mA. The anode was positioned over the supraorbital area and the cathode over the contralateral motor cortex. The following variables were analyzed before and after the 10 neuromodulation sessions: oral language comprehension, copying, dictation, reading, writing, naming and verbal fluency.ResultsThere were no adverse effects in the study. We found statistically significant differences from before to after stimulation in relation to simple sentence comprehension (P = 0.034), naming (P = 0.041) and verbal fluency for names of animals (P = 0.038). Improved scores for performing these three tasks were seen after stimulation.ConclusionsWe observed that excitability of the primary motor cortex through transcranial direct current stimulation was associated with effects on different aspects of language. This can contribute towards future testing in randomized controlled trials.

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