ASTROCYTES: NEW TARGETS FOR STUTTERING THERAPIES? NIH Study In Mice Identifies Type Of Brain Cell Involved In Stuttering


Researchers believe that stuttering – a potentially lifelong and debilitating speech disorder – stems from problems with the circuits in the brain that control speech, but precisely how and where these problems occur is unknown. Now, using a mouse model of stuttering, scientists report that a loss of cells in the brain called astrocytes are associated with stuttering. The mice had been engineered with a human gene mutation previously linked to stuttering. The new study, which appeared online on August 12, 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers insights into the neurological deficits associated with stuttering.


In the mouse study, the loss of astrocytes, a supporting cell in the brain, was most prominent in the corpus callosum, a part of the brain that bridges the two hemispheres. Some previous imaging studies of people with persistent developmental stuttering have revealed structural and functional problems in the same brain region. The study was led by Dennis Drayna, Ph.D., of the Section on Genetics of Communication Disorders,


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at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and from NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and National Institute of Mental Health collaborated on the research.


Stuttering is characterized by pauses and repeated or prolonged sounds, syllables or words, which disrupt the normal flow of speech. People who stutter know what they want to say, but they have trouble saying it. The condition is most commonly seen in young children, who typically outgrow the problem. However, for one in four such children, the condition persists as a lifelong communication problem. It has been estimated that as many as 1 percent of adults in the United States are affected by the disorder.


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