The new neuroscience of stuttering
By Amber Dance ( freelance science writer in the Los Angeles area )
After centuries of misunderstanding , research has finally tied the speech disorder to certain genes and brain alterations — and new treatments may be on the horizon
Gerald Maguire has stuttered since childhood , but you might not guess it from talking to him . For the past 25 years , Maguire — a psychiatrist at the University of California , Riverside — has been treating his disorder with antipsychotic medications not officially approved for the condition . Only with careful attention might you discern his occasional stumble on multisyllabic words like “ statistically ” and “ pharmaceutical .”
Maguire has plenty of company : More than 70 million people worldwide , including about 3 million Americans , stutter — that is , they have difficulty with the starting and timing of speech , resulting in halting and repetition . That number includes approximately 5 percent of children , many of whom outgrow the condition , and 1 percent of adults . Their numbers include President Joe Biden , deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones and actress Emily Blunt . Though those people and many others , including Maguire , have achieved career success , stuttering can contribute to social anxiety and draw ridicule or discrimination by others .
Maguire has been treating people who stutter , and researching potential treatments , for decades . He receives daily emails from people who want to try medications , join his trials , or even donate their brains to his university when they die . He ’ s now embarking on a clinical trial of a new medication , called ecopipam , that streamlined speech and improved quality of life in a small pilot study in 2019 .
Others , meanwhile , are delving into the root causes of stuttering , which also may point to novel treatments . In past decades , therapists mistakenly attributed stuttering to defects of the tongue and voice box , to anxiety , trauma or even poor parenting — and some still do . Yet others have long suspected that neurological problems might underlie stuttering , says J . Scott Yaruss , a speechlanguage pathologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing . The first data to back up that hunch came in 1991 , Yaruss says , when researchers reported altered blood flow in the brains of people who stuttered . Over the past two decades , continuing research has made it more apparent that stuttering is all in the brain .
“ We are in the middle of an absolute explosion of knowledge being developed about stuttering ,” Yaruss says .
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