• Posted April 18, 2025

Magnetic Stimulation Aids Speech Recovery Following Stroke

Lucy Mulloor woke one morning to find she couldn’t call out to her two daughters, who were bustling about the kitchen.

She also couldn’t move the right side of her body, and only attracted her girls’ attention by falling to the floor after working her way to the side of the bed.

The 45-year-old single mom had experienced a massive stroke in the night, and would spend the next five months recuperating in a hospital.

“Hearing I’d had a stroke was a complete shock,” Mulloor said in a news release. “At that time, I was hiking and going to yoga and Zumba regularly. My blood pressure and blood sugar levels were in the healthy range.”

Mulloor now lives with aphasia, a condition that affects her ability to come up with words and string them together into sentences.

But she’s been helped in part by a new therapeutic approach in which powerful magnetic fields are used to stimulate nerve cells in the brain.

This treatment, called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), improved people’s recovery from post-stroke aphasia when combined with intensive speech therapy, new research shows.

“We are very excited by the promising results of this non-invasive therapy as a complementary treatment to speech and language therapy to help people recover words and communicate effectively poststroke,” senior researcher Dr. Sean Dukelow said in a news release. He's a professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine in Alberta, Canada.

Mulloor was one of 44 people with post-stroke aphasia recruited into a small-scale clinical trial.

All participants received two weeks of intensive speech therapy, and half were also provided TMS therapy. The rest thought they were getting TMS, but the machine was not actively stimulating their brains.

Following the stimulation, all patients took part in more than three hours of repetitive drills designed to continue their speech therapy.

All patients showed some level of speech improvement, but the gains were more significant among those who received the magnetic stimulation, results show.

“Based on how well someone was completing the drills, I would think, oh, wow, they received the stimulation, but because the study was double-blinded, we didn’t know,” Shannan Love, the lead speech-language pathologist working with the patients, said in a news release. 

“Overall, we saw a lot of people making functional gains, which was incredible to see,” Love said. “I think the results are very encouraging for people who experience aphasia after a stroke.”

Mulloor joined the study three years after her stroke, and says she experienced a significant improvement in her ability to recall words and speak with confidence as a result of the therapy. Researchers say she was in the group that received TMS treatment.

“It’s really incredible to see that the brain is still capable of rewiring itself long after stroke,” lead researcher Trevor Low, a University of Calgary medical student, said in a news release. “Many of our participants had their stroke several years ago.”

These findings need to be replicated in follow-up studies with more patients, researchers said.

The study appears in the journal Neurology.

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on transcranial magnetic stimulation.

SOURCE: University of Calgary, news release, April 16, 2025