Rehabilitation of Communicative-Pragmatic Ability and Ageing

The ability to communicate effectively allows people to solve several vital functions in everyday life, such as establishing and maintaining social relationships, obtaining health care and satisfying personal needs. Older adults may exhibit a reduction in the ability to communicate due to the generalised cognitive decline that can characterise old age or due to cerebrovascular disease and neurodegenerative pathologies, which frequently occur in late adulthood. The consequences of communicative difficulties can be serious, reducing the possibility of brain-injured patients to return to previous daily activities or contributing to cognitive decline in healthy older adults. In the present chapter, we describe the origin and the social consequences of the most frequent disorders that may affect communicative ability in older adults. Then we focus on rehabilitation programmes to improve the communicative abilities of older patients. In particular, we describe different rehabilitative approaches that have been proved to be effective in both people with brain damage and older adults, highlighting possible weaknesses and limitations. We thus present a novel rehabilitative treatment, i.e. the cognitive pragmatic treatment (CPT) that was recently found to be effective for the recovery of communicative abilities in traumatic brain-injured patients. Finally, we propose that the creation of a specific programme might be useful for enhancing communicative abilities in healthy older adults.