Abstract
A considerable body of research supports the use of behavioral communication treatment
as the standard of care for aphasia. In spite of robust progress in clinical aphasiology,
many questions regarding optimal care remain unanswered. One of the major challenges
to progress in the field is the lack of a common framework to adequately describe
individual treatments, which, if available, would allow comparisons across studies
as well as improved communication among researchers, clinicians, and other stakeholders.
Here, we describe how aphasia treatment approaches can be systematically characterized
using the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS). At the core of the
RTSS is a tripartite structure that focuses on targets (the behavior that is expected
to change as a result of treatment), ingredients (what a clinician does to affect
change in the target), and mechanism(s) of action (why a given treatment works by
linking the ingredients to the target). Three separate articles in the current issue
specifically describe how the RTSS can be used to describe different kinds of aphasia
treatment approaches: functional approaches, cognitive-linguistic approaches, and
biological approaches. It is our hope that the application of the RTSS in clinical
aphasiology will improve communication in published studies, grant proposals, and
in the clinical care of persons with aphasia.
List of abbreviations:
MOA (mechanism of action), RTSS (Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System), SLP (speech-language pathologist), TUF (Treatment of Underlying Forms)Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: November 05, 2021
Accepted:
August 1,
2021
Received in revised form:
July 13,
2021
Received:
March 12,
2021
Footnotes
Disclosures: none
Identification
Copyright
© 2021 The American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
