Bengaluru: Bruce Willis’s family announced Wednesday that the action star was stepping away from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia, a condition that impacts a person’s ability to process and use language.
“To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” said the 67-year old’s family in a statement posted to his daughter’s Instagram account. “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”
The blended family of Willis’s five kids, wife Emma Heming, and ex-wife Demi Moore, was braving it as a “strong unit”, they told fans in the statement, reminding them of Willis’s optimism to “Live it up”.
While his family deals with the condition that has led to his retirement from acting, ThePrint explains what aphasia is, its causes, symptoms and effects.
Symptoms of aphasia
Aphasia is categorised as a communication disorder, marked by difficulties in using and understanding language. It results in the inability to use and process words correctly, affecting speech, processing spoken word, writing and reading.
It is caused by damage to the left side of the brain, which hosts the region for language comprehension, input, and output. It is often caused by a stroke or trauma to the head. It can also be caused by other diseases or tumours in the brain, as well as neurodegenerative disease which develops to progressive and incurable aphasia.
Those with aphasia show significant degeneration in four main behaviours associated with language processing — verbal expression or speech, reading and writing, auditory comprehension or understanding spoken words, and, functional communication or the use of structured forms of communication like non-verbal visual sign language.
Despite the prevalent misconception, aphasia is actually not cognition-related, nor does it impede intelligence; the condition instead makes it difficult to process the meaning of language and find the right words to express thought. Those with the condition are able to communicate through gestures and express themselves to a fair degree. The ability to hear or speak is not affected either– only the ability to correctly understand the meaning of words heard and choose words to use.
Research says that aphasia does not affect formulaic expressions like reciting memorised text or singing familiar songs. There is no disturbance to any sensory or motor processes as well.
Prevention and management
Aphasia is most often caused by strokes or injuries to the brain, so cannot be prevented as a condition. However, factors leading to aphasia can be prevented to a certain extent. A healthy lifestyle, including regular exercise and proper dietary nutrition can drastically reduce the risk of strokes, while adopting physical precautions like wearing protective gear prevents trauma to the head that could lead to brain injury.
Non-progressive aphasia can sometimes be reversed with intensive speech and language therapy. Studies have shown that only high-intensity therapy is effective; low-intensity therapy produced no results and was equivalent to no therapy at all.
Reversal is most common in the first month after diagnosis, beyond which the chances of recovering go down steeply.
Regular progressive and intensive restorative therapy — which can often continue for months and years — can restore the ability to communicate and return some impaired function. Therapy can also be compensatory, trying to substitute impairment with other methods.
Incidentally, an approach that is often adopted after a patient has progressed in therapy, is script training, where the clinician and the patient develop a script with dialogue and repetitively practice till the patient can recite the lines from memory.
While studies on aphasia are few, it is well established that therapy centred around personal support, including family care, increases the quality of life and chances of recovery.
Also read: What is alopecia, Jada Pinkett-Smith’s condition that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock over