Title
Melodic Intonation Therapy for aphasia: A multi‐level meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials and individual participant data
Author
Benjamin Stahl
Faculty of Science, Medical School Berlin
Author
Brenton M. Wiernik
Department of Psychology, University of South Florida
... show all
Abstract
Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) is a prominent rehabilitation program for individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Our meta-analysis investigated the efficacy of MIT while considering quality of outcomes, experimental design, influence of spontaneous recovery, MIT protocol variant, and level of generalization. Extensive literature search identified 606 studies in major databases and trial registers; of those, 22 studies—overall 129 participants—met all eligibility criteria. Multi-level mixed- and random-effects models served to separately meta-analyze randomized controlled trial (RCT) and non-RCT data. RCT evidence on validated outcomes revealed a small-to-moderate standardized effect in noncommunicative language expression for MIT—with substantial uncertainty. Unvalidated outcomes attenuated MIT's effect size compared to validated tests. MIT's effect size was 5.7 times larger for non-RCT data compared to RCT data (g̅case report = 2.01 vs. g̅RCT = 0.35 for validated Non-Communicative Language Expression measures). Effect size for non-RCT data decreased with number of months post-stroke, suggesting confound through spontaneous recovery. Deviation from the original MIT protocol did not systematically alter benefit from treatment. Progress on validated tests arose mainly from gains in repetition tasks rather than other domains of verbal expression, such as everyday communication ability. Our results confirm the promising role of MIT in improving trained and untrained performance on unvalidated outcomes, alongside validated repetition tasks, and highlight possible limitations in promoting everyday communication ability.
Keywords
History and Philosophy of ScienceGeneral Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular BiologyGeneral Neuroscience
Object type
Language
English [eng]
Persistent identifier
https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:1641227
Appeared in
Title
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume
1516
Issue
1
ISSN
0077-8923
Issued
2022
From page
76
To page
84
Publisher
Wiley
Date issued
2022
Access rights
Rights statement
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