Dysphasia vs. Dysphagia

By Jaxson

Main Difference

The main difference between Dysphasia and Dysphagia is that the Dysphasia is a inability to use spoken language and Dysphagia is a medical word for “trouble swallowing”.

  • Dysphasia

    Aphasia is an inability to comprehend and formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. This damage is typically caused by a cerebral vascular accident (stroke), or head trauma; however, these are not the only possible causes. To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person’s speech or language must be significantly impaired in one (or several) of the four communication modalities following acquired brain injury or have significant decline over a short time period (progressive aphasia). The four communication modalities are auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading and writing, and functional communication.

    The difficulties of people with aphasia can range from occasional trouble finding words to losing the ability to speak, read, or write; intelligence, however, is unaffected. Expressive language and receptive language can both be affected as well. Aphasia also affects visual language such as sign language. In contrast, the use of formulaic expressions in everyday communication is often preserved. One prevalent deficit in the aphasias is anomia, which is a deficit in word finding ability.

    The term aphasia implies that one or more communication modalities in the brain have been damaged and are therefore functioning incorrectly. Aphasia does not refer to damage to the brain that results in motor or sensory deficits, which produces abnormal speech; that is, aphasia is not related to the mechanics of speech but rather the individual’s language cognition (although a person can have both problems). An individual’s “language” is the socially shared set of rules as well as the thought processes that go behind verbalized speech. It is not a result of a more peripheral motor or sensory difficulty, such as paralysis affecting the speech muscles or a general hearing impairment.

    Aphasia affects about 2 million people in the US and 250,000 people in Great Britain. Nearly 180,000 people in the US acquire the disorder a year. 84.5% of people have never heard of the condition.

  • Dysphagia

    Dysphagia is the medical term for the symptom of difficulty in swallowing. Although classified under “symptoms and signs” in ICD-10, the term is sometimes used as a condition in its own right. People with dysphagia are sometimes unaware of having it.

    It may be a sensation that suggests difficulty in the passage of solids or liquids from the mouth to the stomach, a lack of pharyngeal sensation, or various other inadequacies of the swallowing mechanism. Dysphagia is distinguished from other symptoms including odynophagia, which is defined as painful swallowing, and globus, which is the sensation of a lump in the throat. A person can have dysphagia without odynophagia (dysfunction without pain), odynophagia without dysphagia (pain without dysfunction), or both together. A psychogenic dysphagia is known as phagophobia.

Wikipedia
  • Dysphasia (noun)

    Loss of or deficiency in the power to use or understand language as a result of injury or disease of the brain.

  • Dysphagia (noun)

    Difficulty in swallowing.

Wiktionary
  • Dysphagia (noun)

    difficulty or discomfort in swallowing, as a symptom of disease

    “progressive dysphagia”

Oxford Dictionary

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