PRIMARY PROGRESSIVE APHASIA

Abstract

Recently, clinical speech and language pathologists are facing a new challenge, diagnosing and suggesting intervention strategies for patients with progressive aphasia. This clinical syndrome differs in many aspects from classical vascular aphasia. Most often, these language deficits occur in the frontal temporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) clinical presentation. Patients have primarily linguistic-cognitive deficits that influence their daily communication and negatively affect their quality of life. Diagnosing different subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) should focus on the single word level (anomia, paraphasia, words comprehension), sentence level (agrammatism, sentence comprehension impairment), and discourse level (impaired coherence, interpretation). In this review article, we summarize the basic information about PPA, in particular, the language deficits of various subtypes as well as language assessment procedures.

Keywords

• frontotemporal lobar degeneration
• cognitive-communication disorders
• primary progressive aphasia