Wagamaga OP t1_irwyjx7 wrote
A clinical study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center found that, for children who had a major stroke to the left hemisphere of their brain within days of their birth, the infant’s brain was “plastic” enough for the right hemisphere to acquire the language abilities ordinarily handled by the left side, while also maintaining its own language abilities as well.
The left hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for sentence processing (understanding words and sentences as we listen to speech). The right hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for processing the emotion of the voice — is it happy or sad, angry or calm. This study sought to answer the question, “What happens when one of the hemispheres is injured at birth?”
The findings appear in PNAS the week of October 10, 2022.
The participants in this study developed normally during pregnancy. But around birth they had a significant stroke, one that would have debilitating outcomes in adults. In infants, a stroke is much rarer, but does happen in roughly one out of every 4,000 births.
The researchers studied perinatal arterial ischemic stroke, a type of brain injury occurring around the time of birth in which blood flow is cut off to a part of the brain by a blood clot. The same type of stroke occurs much more commonly in adults. Previous studies of brain injury in infants have included several types of brain injury; the focus in this study on a specific type of injury enabled the authors to find more consistent effects than in previous work.
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