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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 . can ’ t be certain if those differences are the cause or a result of the stutter . Geneticists are identifying variations in certain genes that predispose a person to stutter , but the genes themselves are puzzling : Only recently have their links to brain anatomy become apparent .
Maguire , meanwhile , is pursuing treatments based on dopamine , a chemical messenger in the brain that helps to regulate emotions and movement ( precise muscle movements , of course , are needed for intelligible speech ). Scientists are just beginning to braid these disparate threads together , even as they forge ahead with early testing for treatments based on their discoveries .
Many famous people have a stutter or did so as a child , including ( left to right ) President Joe Biden , actor James Earl Jones and actor Emily Blunt .
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 speech-language 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 .
There ’ s still a lot to figure out , though . Neuroscientists have observed subtle differences in the brains of people who stutter , but they
Slowed circuitry
Looking at a standard brain scan of someone who stutters , a radiologist won ’ t notice anything amiss . It ’ s only when experts look closely , with specialized technology that shows the brain ’ s indepth structure and activity during speech , that subtle differences between groups who do and don ’ t stutter become apparent .
The problem isn ’ t confined to one part of the brain . Rather , it ’ s all about connections between different parts , says speech-language pathologist and neuroscientist Soo-Eun Chang of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor . For example , in the brain ’ s left hemisphere , people who stutter often appear to have slightly weaker connections between the areas responsible for hearing and for the movements that generate speech . Chang has also observed structural differences in the corpus callosum , the big bundle of nerve fibers that links the left and right hemispheres of the brain .
These findings hint that stuttering might result from slight delays in communication between parts of the brain . Speech , Chang suggests , would be particularly susceptible to such delays because it must be coordinated at lightning speed .