The IAA One Minute Blog

Bruce Willis’s family announced the actor will be stepping away from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia.

Aphasia Diagnosis

Aphasia is a condition that affects your ability to communicate. It can affect your speech, as well as the way you write and understand both spoken and written language.

With his diagnosis, 67 year old Willis joins a community of around 200,000 people in the United States who develop aphasia every year, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Aphasia is a disorder that affects people of all ages, although Willis represents the most common population, people who are middle-aged or older.

Symptoms of Aphasia

Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder, which means that it is something that happens during the course of life instead of being present from birth.

A person with aphasia may:

• Not understand other people’s conversations
• Speak in sentences that don’t make sense
• Speak in short or incomplete sentences
• Speak unrecognizable words
• Substitute one word for another or one sound for another
• Write sentences that don’t make sense

Aphasia typically occurs after a stroke or a head injury. It can also come on gradually from a slow-growing brain tumor or a disease that causes progressive, permanent damage.

People with aphasia may have different patterns of strengths and weaknesses:

• Comprehensive aphasia: People with this pattern of aphasia may speak easily and fluently in long, complex sentences that don’t make sense or include unrecognizable, incorrect or unnecessary words. They usually don’t understand spoken language well and often don’t realize that others can’t understand them.
• Expressive aphasia: People with this pattern of aphasia may understand what other people say better than they can speak. People with this pattern of aphasia struggle to get words out, speak in very short sentences and omit words. A listener can usually understand the meaning, but people with this aphasia pattern are often unaware of their difficulty communicating and may get frustrated.
• Global aphasia: This aphasia pattern is characterized by poor comprehension and difficulty forming words and sentences.

While people with aphasia have difficulty communicating, the disorder itself does not affect their intelligence, according to the National Aphasia Association.

What IAA has to Say

When a celebrity speaks out on their personal diagnosis and/or disorder, it allows for a better understanding of certain health conditions. Insurance Administrator of America wants you to have this information on certain diseases and conditions through these blog posts. Remember, with IAA one call does it all.

Like this blog post? Let IAA know by going to our Facebook page and clicking the Like button.