News & Stories
New Paper in Brain and Language
September 4, 2024
Written by: Stephany Daniel
The new article was published in Volume 253 of Brain and Language
Emily O. Garnett, Ph.D., and Soo-Eun Chang, Ph.D. co-authored a new paper with lead author Hannah P. Rowe, Ph.D., and fellow co-authors Jason A. Tourville, Ph.D., Alfonso Nieto-Castañon, Ph.D., Ho Ming Chow, Ph.D., and Frank H. Guenther, Ph.D.
Their paper, Evidence for planning and motor subtypes of stuttering based on resting state functional connectivity, was published in Brain and Language.
Keep reading to learn more about their latest findings and how they may offer a new strategy for advancing future stuttering research.
What are the findings?
Researchers have spent many years comparing the brain scans of people who stutter with those who don’t to look for unique brain differences that could point to a cause of stuttering. Despite this careful research, pinpointing an exact cause of stuttering has been difficult. Even among the brain scans just from people who stutter, there is a lot of variation in how their brains look and there isn’t one clear feature that stands out as related to stuttering.
Because of this, researchers have begun to look more closely at this variation among the brains of people who stutter to try to find patterns. In their paper, the co-authors present initial evidence that there may be two key groups—called subtypes—of stuttering brains. One subtype shows differences in the area of the brain that organizes language. The other subtype shows differences in the area of the brain that controls movement, especially those related to the act of speaking.
These subtypes were found by reviewing the brain scans of 170 participants while they were at rest inside of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine. While more research is needed to confirm these two subtypes and better understand them, these early findings can help researchers by identifying patterns in the differences that are found in the brains of people who stutter.
Why is this research important?
In order to find the cause(s) of stuttering, researchers need to better understand what makes the brains of people who stutter unique. The more information that researchers have about how stuttering looks inside the brain, the closer they will come to understanding the condition and hopefully be able to develop treatments that improve people’s lives.