Abstract 

Objective: To determine whether MRI-based cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) burden predicts treatment-induced aphasia recovery in chronic stroke patients above and beyond initial aphasia severity and stroke-lesion volume. Design: Retrospective. Four cSVD neuroimaging markers were rated using validated visual scales: white matter hyperintensities, enlarged perivascular spaces, lacunes and global cortical atrophy. We also calculated a cSVD total score. We employed linear regression models to model treatment response as a function of cSVD burden. We also ran correlation analyses to determine the association among cSVD burden and pre-treatment linguistic and non-linguistic cognition. Setting: Research clinic. Participants: The study includes data from 30 chronic stroke patients with aphasia who received treatment for word finding difficulties and completed additional pre-treatment neuroimaging and behavioral assessments. Interventions: 120-minute sessions of anomia treatment 2 times per week for up to 12 weeks. Main outcome measures: Change in accuracy on the treatment probes measured as a percentage (i.e., change in accuracy percentage score = post-treatment accuracy percentage minus pre-treatment accuracy percentage). Results: Baseline cSVD burden predicted response to anomia treatment independently from demographic and stroke-related factors. Patients with lower cSVD burden exhibited enhanced rehabilitation response compared to those with higher cSVD burden (β = -6.816e-02, p = 0.019). cSVD burden was highly associated with nonverbal executive function at baseline (r = -0.49, p = 0.005): patients with lower cSVD burden exhibited higher performance on nonverbal executive function tasks compared to participants with higher cSVD burden. No association was observed among cSVD burden and performance on language tasks at the baseline. Conclusions: cSVD, a marker of brain reserve and a robust risk factor for post-stroke dementia, may be used as a biomarker for distinguishing patients that are more likely to respond to anomia therapy from those that are less likely to do so and for individualizing treatment parameters (e.g., targeting both linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition in severe cSVD).