It has been reported for more than 100 years that patients with severe nonfluent aphasia are better at singing lyrics than they are at speaking the same words. This observation led to the development of melodic intonation therapy (MIT). However, the efficacy of this therapy has yet to be substantiated in a randomized controlled trial. Furthermore, its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear...

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative disorder with language impairment as the primary feature. Different subtypes have been described and the 3 best characterized are progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), semantic dementia (SD) and logopenic/phonological aphasia (LPA). Of these subtypes, LPA is most commonly associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. However, the fe...

Arnold Pick’s description of lobar atrophy with progressive aphasia, apraxia and behavioural disturbance has been renamed Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). A significant expansion of knowledge has occurred in the last few years, especially in the molecular biology of FTD, which is estimated to account for 12-15% of all dementias and 30-50% of early onset cases. The clinical picture consists mainly...

This study sought to discover if an optimum 1 cm(2) area in the non-damaged right hemisphere (RH) was present, which could temporarily improve naming in chronic, nonfluent aphasia patients when suppressed with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Ten minutes of slow, 1Hz rTMS was applied to suppress different RH ROIs in eight aphasia cases. Picture naming and response time (RT) ...

A 74-year-old right-handed woman without cognitive impairment suddenly developed nonfluent aphasia. Brain MRI showed acute infarction in the right frontal lobe and insula without involvement of the corpus callosum. A neurological examination demonstrated not only transcortical motor aphasia, but also ideomotor apraxia and right hand predominant constructional apraxia (CA). To date, right hand p...

BACKGROUND: Classical aphasiology, based on the study of stroke sequelae, fuses speech fluency and grammatical ability. Nonfluent (Broca's) aphasia often is accompanied by agrammatism; whereas in the fluent aphasias grammatical deficits are not typical. The assumption that a similar relationship exists in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has led to the dichotomization of this syndrome into flu...