Stroke remains the second-leading cause of death and the third-leading cause of death and disability combined. The Global Burden of Disease Study indicates that the lower and lower-middle-income countries bear the brunt of disability. Aphasia and motor disability are the most crippling in stroke. Aphasia rehabilitation is often ignored and underplayed. 

In India particularly, aphasia rehabilitation is sub-optimal due to a combination of lack of trained personnel and suitable adaptive strategies which are being practiced in the Western world. Music therapy has been shown to improve verbal fluency. However, there is no adapted and/or validated tool for the same in Indian patients. Not only the language, but the musical familiarity of the Indians is also very different from the West. The Indian ‘raags’, folk songs and popular music should be adapted to the aphasia rehabilitation program to engage the non-dominant hemisphere for non-fluent aphasia rehabilitation. The efficacy of this rehabilitation tool can be established by improvement in aphasia battery performance as well as by near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).

We hypothesize that the Indian version of music rehabilitation module for non-fluent aphasia rehabilitation in post-stroke patients will improve their scores in Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We propose to do this by initial formulation of the module by a team of expert speech and language therapists (SLTs) and neurologists. This will subsequently be pilot tested and optimized. Finally, a pilot randomized controlled trial of this intervention will be compared with standard speech rehabilitation.