PRIMARY PROGRESSIVE APHASIA IS A NEURODEGENERATIVE DISORDER THAT WAS RECENTLY CLASSIFIED INTO THREE TYPES: fluent (semantic), nonfluent, and logopenic. The logopenic variant is the least common one and is closely related to Alzheimer's disease in comparison to the other two variants that are closely related to frontotemporal dementia. We report the case of a middle-aged woman who presented to o...

Two cases of aphasia after right hemispheric stroke in right handed patients are described. The first patient had a severe mixed transcortical aphasia, apraxia and neglect after a lesion involving the right lenticular nucleus and periventricular white matter; aphasia was still present after three months. The second patient had a mild, transient fluent aphasia after a small right hemispheric per...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the clinical usefulness of informal conversation as a tool for determining ability to communicate potential regardless of modality (verbal or nonverbal). Four individuals with aphasia (two non-fluent and two fluent) and four non-impaired individuals participated in this study. Selected segments of conversational discourse were analyzed for communicat...

A 79-year-old man, admitted for left knee replacement, complained of right-sided vision loss on postoperative day 3. Examination revealed a right homonymous hemianopsia, fluent speech with semantic paraphasias, and impaired naming and comprehension, with intact repetition. MRI of the brain (figure) showed restricted diffusion affecting the left pulvinar nucleus, without signal abnormality in th...

The nature and frequency of speech production errors in neurodegenerative disease have not previously been precisely quantified. In the present study, 16 patients with a progressive form of non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) were asked to tell a story from a wordless children's picture book. Errors in production were classified as either phonemic, involving language-based deformations that nevertheless ...

We report a patient with non-fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia who was premorbidly literate in two alphabetic scripts, Hungarian (L1) and English (L2). Testing was performed over a two-year period to assess the impact of progressive illness on oral reading and repetition of single words. Results showed significant decline in oral reading in both languages, and an effect of language status in f...

There is an ongoing debate as to whether singing helps left-hemispheric stroke patients recover from non-fluent aphasia through stimulation of the right hemisphere. According to recent work, it may not be singing itself that aids speech production in non-fluent aphasic patients, but rhythm and lyric type. However, the long-term effects of melody and rhythm on speech recovery are largely unknown...

Primary progressive aphasia is a neurodegenerative clinical syndrome that presents in adulthood with an isolated, progressive language disorder. Three main clinical/anatomical variants have been described, each associated with distinctive pathology. A high frequency of neurodevelopmental learning disability in primary progressive aphasia has been reported. Because the disorder is heterogeneous ...

Genome-wide association studies in frontotemporal dementia showed limited success in identifying associated loci. This is possibly due to small sample size, allelic heterogeneity, small effect sizes of single genetic variants, and the necessity to statistically correct for testing millions of genetic variants. To overcome these issues, we performed gene-based association studies on 3348 clinica...

Aphasia describes a spectrum of speech impairments due to damage in the language centers of the brain. Insult to the inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant cerebral hemisphere results in Broca's aphasia - the inability to produce fluent speech. The left cerebral hemisphere has historically been considered the dominant side, a characteristic long presumed to be related to a person's "handedness"...