scholarly journals Stealing Cookies in the Twenty-First Century: Measures of Spoken Narrative in Healthy Versus Speakers With Aphasia

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1S) ◽  
pp. 321-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shauna Berube ◽  
Jodi Nonnemacher ◽  
Cornelia Demsky ◽  
Shenly Glenn ◽  
Sadhvi Saxena ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Data ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Total Content ◽  
First Century ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Link Type ◽  
The Future ◽  
Language Output

Purpose Our goal was to evaluate an updated version of the “Cookie Theft” picture by obtaining norms based on picture descriptions by healthy controls for total content units (CUs), syllables per CU, and the ratio of left–right CUs. In addition, we aimed to compare these measures from healthy controls to picture descriptions obtained from individuals with poststroke aphasia and primary progressive aphasia (PPA) to assess whether these measures can capture impairments in content and efficiency of communication. Method Using an updated version of this picture, we analyzed descriptions from 50 healthy controls to develop norms for numbers of syllables, total CUs, syllables per CU, and left–right CU. We provide preliminary data from 44 individuals with aphasia (19 with poststroke aphasia and 25 with PPA). Results A total of 96 CUs were established based on the written transcriptions of spoken picture descriptions of the 50 control participants. There was a significant effect of group on total CUs, syllables, syllables per CU, and left–right CUs. The poststroke participants produced significantly fewer total CU and syllables than those with PPA. Each aphasic group produced significantly fewer total CUs, fewer syllables, more syllables per CU, and lower left–right CUs (indicating a right-sided bias) compared to controls. Conclusions Results show that the measures of numbers of syllables, total CUs, syllables per CU, and left–right CUs can distinguish language output of individuals with aphasia from controls and capture impairments in content and efficiency of communication. A limitation of this study is that we evaluated only 44 individuals with aphasia. In the future, we will evaluate other measures, such as CUs per minute, lexical variability, grammaticality, and ratio of nouns to verbs. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7015223

Spanish Version of the Mini-Linguistic State Examination for the Diagnosis of Primary Progressive Aphasia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Jordi A. Matias-Guiu ◽  
Vanesa Pytel ◽  
Laura Hernández-Lorenzo ◽  
Nikil Patel ◽  
Katie A. Peterson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Spanish Version ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Language Test ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Clinical Variants ◽  
State Examination

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome with three main clinical variants: non-fluent, semantic, and logopenic. Clinical diagnosis and accurate classification are challenging and often time-consuming. The Mini-Linguistic State Examination (MLSE) has been recently developed as a short language test to specifically assess language in neurodegenerative disorders. Objective: Our aim was to adapt and validate the Spanish version of MLSE for PPA diagnosis. Methods: Cross-sectional study involving 70 patients with PPA and 42 healthy controls evaluated with the MLSE. Patients were independently diagnosed and classified according to comprehensive cognitive evaluation and advanced neuroimaging. Results: Internal consistency was 0.758. The influence of age and education was very low. The area under the curve for discriminating PPA patients and healthy controls was 0.99. Effect sizes were moderate-large for the discrimination between PPA and healthy controls. Motor speech, phonology, and semantic subscores discriminated between the three clinical variants. A random forest classification model obtained an F1-score of 81%for the three PPA variants. Conclusion: Our study provides a brief and useful language test for PPA diagnosis, with excellent properties for both clinical routine assessment and research purposes.

scholarly journals An Overview on Primary Progressive Aphasia and Its Variants

2006 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serena Amici ◽  
Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini ◽  
Jennifer M. Ogar ◽  
Nina F. Dronkers ◽  
Bruce L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Cognitive Domains ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Word Finding ◽  
Degenerative Disorder ◽  
Language Output ◽  
Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia

We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropschychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: (1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), (2) semantic dementia (SD), (3) logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). PNFA is characterized by labored speech, agrammatism in production, and/or comprehension. In some cases the syndrome begins with isolated deficits in speech. SD patients typically present with loss of word and object meaning and surface dyslexia. LPA patients have word-finding difficulties, syntactically simple but accurate language output and impaired sentence comprehension. The neuropsychological data demonstrated that SD patients show the most characteristic pattern of impairment, while PNFA and LPA overlap within many cognitive domains. The neuroimaging analysis showed left perisylvian region involvement. A comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging and pathological approach is necessary to identify the clinical and pathogenetic features of different PPA variants.

scholarly journals Memory Resilience in Alzheimer Disease With Primary Progressive Aphasia

Neurology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 96 (6) ◽  
pp. e916-e925
Author(s):  
M.-Marsel Mesulam ◽  
Christina Coventry ◽  
Alan Kuang ◽  
Eileen H. Bigio ◽  
Qinwen Mao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer Disease ◽  
Verbal Memory ◽  
Incidental Finding ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Neurofibrillary Degeneration ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Language Functions ◽  
Link Type ◽  
Potential Factors

ObjectiveTo determine whether memory is preserved longitudinally in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) associated with Alzheimer disease (AD) and to identify potential factors that maintain memory despite underlying neurofibrillary degeneration of mediotemporal memory areas.MethodsLongitudinal memory assessment was done in 17 patients with PPA with autopsy or biomarker evidence of AD (PPA-AD) and 14 patients with amnestic dementia of the Alzheimer type with AD at autopsy (DAT-AD).ResultsIn PPA-AD, episodic memory, tested with nonverbal items, was preserved at the initial testing and showed no decline at retesting 2.35 ± 0.78 years later, at which time symptoms had been present for 6.26 ± 2.21 years. In contrast, language functions declined significantly during the same period. In DAT-AD, both verbal memory and language declined with equal severity. Although imaging showed asymmetric left-sided mediotemporal atrophy in PPA-AD, autopsy revealed bilateral hippocampo-entorhinal neurofibrillary degeneration at Braak stages V and VI. Compared to DAT-AD, however, the PPA-AD group had lower incidence of APOE ε4 and of mediotemporal TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) pathology.ConclusionsMemory preservation in PPA is not just an incidental finding at onset but a core feature that persists for years despite the hippocampo-entorhinal AD neuropathology that is as severe as that of DAT-AD. Asymmetry of mediotemporal atrophy and a lesser impact of APOE ε4 and of TDP-43 on the integrity of memory circuitry may constitute some of the factors underlying this resilience. Our results also suggest that current controversies on memory in PPA-AD reflect inconsistencies in the diagnosis of logopenic PPA, the clinical variant most frequently associated with AD.ClinicalTrials.gov IdentifierNCT00537004 and NCT03371706.

scholarly journals Comparing two facets of emotion perception across multiple neurodegenerative diseases

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 511-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casey L Brown ◽  
Alice Y Hua ◽  
Lize De Coster ◽  
Virginia E Sturm ◽  
Joel H Kramer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neurodegenerative Diseases ◽  
Progressive Supranuclear Palsy ◽  
Emotion Perception ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Tracking Task ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Dynamic Tracking ◽  
Semantic Variant

Abstract Deficits in emotion perception (the ability to infer others’ emotions accurately) can occur as a result of neurodegeneration. It remains unclear how different neurodegenerative diseases affect different forms of emotion perception. The present study compares performance on a dynamic tracking task of emotion perception (where participants track the changing valence of a film character’s emotions) with performance on an emotion category labeling task (where participants label specific emotions portrayed by film characters) across seven diagnostic groups (N = 178) including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), corticobasal syndrome and healthy controls. Consistent with hypotheses, compared to controls, the bvFTD group was impaired on both tasks. The svPPA group was impaired on the emotion labeling task, whereas the nfvPPA, PSP and AD groups were impaired on the dynamic tracking task. Smaller volumes in bilateral frontal and left insular regions were associated with worse labeling, whereas smaller volumes in bilateral medial frontal, temporal and right insular regions were associated with worse tracking. Findings suggest labeling and tracking facets of emotion perception are differentially affected across neurodegenerative diseases due to their unique neuroanatomical correlates.

scholarly journals Primary Progressive Aphasia: Use of Graphical Markers for an Early and Differential Diagnosis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 1198
Author(s):  
Alexandra Plonka ◽  
Aurélie Mouton ◽  
Joël Macoir ◽  
Thi-Mai Tran ◽  
Alexandre Derremaux ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Differential Diagnosis ◽  
Healthy Subjects ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Clinical Settings ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Digital Tablet

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) brings together neurodegenerative pathologies whose main characteristic is to start with a progressive language disorder. PPA diagnosis is often delayed in non-specialised clinical settings. With the technologies’ development, new writing parameters can be extracted, such as the writing pressure on a touch pad. Despite some studies having highlighted differences between patients with typical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and healthy controls, writing parameters in PPAs are understudied. The objective was to verify if the writing pressure in different linguistic and non-linguistic tasks can differentiate patients with PPA from patients with AD and healthy subjects. Patients with PPA (n = 32), patients with AD (n = 22) and healthy controls (n = 26) were included in this study. They performed a set of handwriting tasks on an iPad® digital tablet, including linguistic, cognitive non-linguistic, and non-cognitive non-linguistic tasks. Average and maximum writing pressures were extracted for each task. We found significant differences in writing pressure, between healthy controls and patients with PPA, and between patients with PPA and AD. However, the classification of performances was dependent on the nature of the tasks. These results suggest that measuring writing pressure in graphical tasks may improve the early diagnosis of PPA, and the differential diagnosis between PPA and AD.

scholarly journals White Matter Disruption and Connected Speech in Non-Fluent and Semantic Variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karine Marcotte ◽  
Naida L. Graham ◽  
Kathleen C. Fraser ◽  
Jed A. Meltzer ◽  
David F. Tang-Wai ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
White Matter ◽  
Diffusion Tensor ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Radial Diffusivity ◽  
Connected Speech ◽  
Single Measure ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Inferior Longitudinal Fasciculus

Differential patterns of white matter disruption have recently been reported in the non-fluent (nfvPPA) and semantic (svPPA) variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). No single measure is sufficient to distinguish between the PPA variants, but connected speech allows for the quantification of multiple measures. The aim of the present study was to further investigate the white matter correlates associated with connected speech features in PPA. We examined the relationship between white matter metrics and connected speech deficits using an automated analysis of transcriptions of connected speech and diffusion tensor imaging in language-related tracts. Syntactic, lexical, and semantic features were automatically extracted from transcriptions of topic-directed interviews conducted with groups of individuals with nfvPPA or svPPA as well as with a group of healthy controls. A principal component analysis was performed in order to reduce the number of language measures and yielded a five-factor solution. The results indicated that nfvPPA patients differed from healthy controls on a syntactic factor, and svPPA patients differed from controls on two semantic factors. However, the patient groups did not differ on any factor. Moreover, a correlational analysis revealed that the lexical richness factor was significantly correlated with radial diffusivity in the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus, which suggests that semantic deficits in connected speech reflect a disruption of this ventral pathway, and which is largely consistent with the results of previous studies. Using an automated approach for the analysis of connected speech combined with probabilistic tractography, the present findings demonstrate that nfvPPA patients are impaired relative to healthy controls on syntactic measures and have increased radial diffusivity in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus, whereas the svPPA group was impaired on lexico-semantic measures relative to controls and showed increased radial diffusivity in the uncinate and inferior longitudinal fasciculus bilaterally.

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