UMD seeks healthy volunteers over 45
Jan Ainali, CC BY 3.0 
If you know someone who had a stroke, you know how difficult it can be to re-learn how to walk, talk and write. Now’s your chance to help future generations recover from brain injury more quickly.
The University of Maryland needs healthy volunteers over 45 who have never had a stroke to participate in a new study. With a single visit to its College Park campus and two virtual sessions, you can be part of a research study that aims to streamline speech therapy for stroke patients.
“This study is trying to assess various aspects of language — to see where and how the breakdown is happening, so we can address that particular element in speech therapy,” said Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah, Ph.D., a professor in the university’s department of Hearing and Speech Sciences who is the principal investigator of the study.
After a stroke, people can lose the ability to express themselves, a condition known as aphasia.
“If your grammar breaks down, you can’t produce sentences. They talk in fragments,” Faroqi-Shah explained. “The long-term goal is to improve speech therapy for aphasia by better understanding how language breaks down.”
So far, speech therapy is a slow process that can take months, if not years, to help people recover the ability to speak.
“Speech therapy for aphasia has been around for a long time, and its effectiveness could be improved,” she said.
How it works
The study is currently recruiting 30 people 45 to 70 with normal cognitive function.
The study only requires one in-person visit. Participants will go to College Park, Maryland, to undergo two non-invasive scans. Neither scan uses radiation.
The first, an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, takes about an hour.
The second, a magnetoencephalography scan, or MEG, takes place in a machine that resembles an MRI machine. It’s a 90-minute, non-invasive test that measures the magnetic field generated by the electrical activity of the brain.
“The MRI is noisy, as many people know. The MEG is perfectly silent,” Faroqi-Shah said. “You just lie down, and it measures the halo of a magnetic field around your head” as you speak.
Faroqi-Shah tried it herself, since MEG scanners are relatively rare; only a few hundred exist in the world.
“I fell asleep,” she admitted. “I did my own experiment to try it out and see how it works, but I dozed off. It’s very quiet, very comfortable. It’s safe as well; there’s no radiation.”
Tech help available
After the two scans, which can take several hours, participants will complete the study from home. They’ll take cognitive tests on a home computer or laptop (not a tablet). In those tests, they’ll identify nouns and verbs and construct sentences in the past, future or present tense.
If they need help, UMD researchers can guide the way.
“My team is very well trained to walk them through various technology tasks,” Faroqi-Shah said.
University’s registry
In addition, study participants can sign up for notifications of future studies, paid and unpaid, at the university. The volunteer registry, known as Communication across the Lifespan at Maryland, or CALM, is open to those with or without communication problems.
For more information about the registry, visit calm.umd.edu. To volunteer for the current study, email aphasia@umd.edu or call (301) 405-2477.
