Aphasia — Comprehensive overview covers causes, treatment, coping skills for this communication disorder. (Source: MayoClinic.com Full Feed)MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

In conclusion, valproate can induce delirium at therapeutic blood levels in some patients via various mechanisms and this side effect has to be considered during valproate use. PMID: 20204907 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Turkish Journal of Psychiatry)

This article provides a clinically oriented review of PPA. Different clinical presentations and imaging findings of 3 subtypes, agrammatic, semantic and logopenic, are presented. Underlying neuropathology, medical and social management aspects of these patients are reviewed. (Source: American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias)

We report a very rare case of an overdose intrathecal GD injection presenting with neurotoxic manifestations, including a decreased level of consciousness, global aphasia, rigidity, and visual disturbance. PMID: 20191058 [PubMed - in process] (Source: J Korean Med Sci)

Alzheimer's disease is the most prevalent and common form of cognitive impairment, ie, dementia, in the elderly followed in second place by vascular dementia due to the microangiopathy associated with poorly-controlled hypertension. Besides blood pressure elevation, advancing age is the strongest risk factor for dementia. Deterioration of intellectual function and cognitive skills that leads to the elderly patient becoming more and more dependent in his, her, activities of daily living, ie, bathing, dressing, feeding self, locomotion, and personal hygiene. It has been known and demonstrated for many years that lowering of blood pressure from a previous hypertensive point can result in stroke prevention yet lowering of blood pressure does not prevent the microangiopathy that leads to white ...

Cranial pachymeningitis is a poorly understood syndrome, defined by leptomeningeal thickening and typical gadolinium enhanced MRI. The heterogeneous clinical and aetiological features of five patients with both focal and diffuse pachymeningitis are presented. The initial symptoms included headache (n=3), sensory Jackson seizures (n=1), hemiparesis (n=1), episodes of short lasting hemiataxia (n=1), hemihypaesthesia (n=1), aphasia (n=1) and confusion (n=2). MRI scans revealed focal (n=3) or diffuse (n=2) leptomeningeal gadolinium enhancement and cortical swelling (n=4). In addition, one case presented with a subarachnoid and a second with an intracerebral haemorraghe. CSF findings were variable and showed clear lymphomonocytic pleocytosis in 3/5 cases. Infectious diseases were extensively ex...MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

Temporal-lobe lesions sometimes cause apnoeic attacks in infants, but they rarely cause apnoeic attacks in adults. An 80-year-old woman with a history of hypertension was admitted to hospital because of global aphasia and mild right hemiparesis. The admission head CT showed small subcortical haemorrhage in the left temporal lobe. Immediately after the CT, her respiratory rate decreased to 3/min, and her arterial blood gas analysis showed respiratory acidaemia without any evidence of airway obstruction or additional neurological deficits. Thus, she required artificial ventilation. Single-photon emission CT performed on the same day showed hyperperfusion in the left temporal region, but the electroencephalogram showed no epileptic spike. When mechanical ventilation was discontinued on the fo...

CONCLUSIONS: Patients fulfilling definition A and F had best short-term and medium-term outcomes. They would be best suited to the definition of "minor stroke." PMID: 20185781 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Stroke)

We describe clinico-pathological findings in a patient with progressive anterior operculum syndrome. A 74-year-old right-handed man had noticed speech and swallowing difficulties 1 year previously. Neurological examinations showed no abnormality other than a slight limitation of upward gaze and slow tongue movement without fibrillation. We investigated the patient using neuroimaging and neuropsychological examinations and observed him for 2 years until his death, at which point we obtained pathological findings. The patient’s facial and masseteric muscles seemed hypotonic with drooling, but he could laugh and yawn normally, showing automatic voluntary dissociation. Palatal and pharyngeal reflexes were normal. Magnetic resonance imaging showed cortical atrophy in the tempo...

Conclusions: Semi-automated MRI atrophy measures are potentially useful objective biomarkers of progression in frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD); however, careful stratification of FTLD subtypes will be important in future clinical trials of disease-modifying therapies. (Source: Neurology)

Discussion. Semantic access and integration are performed differently in aphasic subjects with severe comprehension deficits. These differences in lexical—semantic processing must be taken into account in rehabilitation approaches that aim to improve comprehension deficits. Moreover, the findings may contribute to the design of therapy studies by employing a physiological measure that can discriminate among patients at baseline and at the end of an intervention. (Source: Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair)MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration is comprised of three syndromes: frontotemporal dementia (FTD), semantic dementia, and progressive nonfluent aphasia, with FTD being the most prevalent. FTD is characterized predominantly by character change and disordered social conduct. A variety of pathologies may underlie these syndromes, yet it is the location of the pathology rather than the type that dictates the clinical features of the disease. Several medications have been investigated to measure efficacy of treatment in FTD, often with mixed results. The authors review these findings and comment on future directions. (Source: J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci)

(Source: J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci)

We report a subject with chronic non-fluent aphasia who showed stable deficits of elicited propositional speech over the course of 5years, and received 1200 pulses of 1Hz rTMS daily for 10days at a site identified as being optimally responsive to rTMS in this patient. Consistent with prior studies there was improvement in object naming, with a statistically significant improvement in action naming. Improvement was also demonstrated in picture description at 2, 6, and 10months after rTMS with respect to the number of narrative words and nouns, sentence length, and use of closed class words. Compared to his baseline performance, the patient showed significant improvement on the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) subscale for spontaneous speech. These findings suggest that manipulation of the inta...

A UQ study will employ a unique mobile phone application to improve the "communicative fitness" and lifestyle of brain-injured patients. Led by Professor Linda Worrall from UQ's Clinical Centre for Research Excellence (CCRE) in Aphasia Rehabilitation, the study will be the first of its kind to use the technology in combining two complementary approaches to aphasia rehabilitation into one optimal treatment outcome. Aphasia, a language difficulty attributed to injury of the brain, usually from stroke, is estimated to affect 80,000 Australians... (Source: Health News from Medical News Today)

Conclusions & Implications: The data support the reliability and validity of the Scenario Test as an instrument for examining daily-life communication in aphasia. The test focuses on multimodal communication; its psychometric qualities enable future studies on the effect of Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) training in aphasia. PMID: 20144004 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders)MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

Conclusions  Pathogenic mutations were found only in FTD-spectrum cases and not in other related neurodegenerative diseases. Haploinsufficiency of GRN is the predominant mechanism leading to FTD. (Source: Archives of Neurology)

In conclusion, communication disorders were relatively complex and could not be summarised by syntactical and lexical difficulties in left stroke and pragmatic problems in right stroke. The former also showed severe verbal pragmatic difficulties. Frontal stroke also resulted in evident verbal and non-verbal disorders. Content Type Journal ArticleCategory Original CommunicationDOI 10.1007/s00415-010-5469-8Authors Marc Rousseaux, Hôpital Swynghedauw, CHRU Service de Rééducation Neurologique 59037 Lille FranceWalter Daveluy, Hôpital Swynghedauw, CHRU Service de Rééducation Neurologique 59037 Lille FranceOdile Kozlowski, Hôpital Swynghedauw, CHRU Service de Rééducation Neurologique 59037 Lille France Journal Journal of NeurologyOnline ISSN 1432-1459Print ISSN 0340-5354 (...

Conclusions & Implications: Bringing discharge practice from the realm of implicit knowledge to one that can be examined and discussed in an explicit manner should help reduce anxieties about discharge for new clinicians, help to clarify and improve the discharge approaches used by clinicians and lead to better discharge experiences for clients. PMID: 20131962 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders)

We report a patient with recurrent epileptic Wernicke aphasia who prior to this presentation, had been misdiagnosed as transient ischemic attacks for several years. This case report emphasizes the consideration of epileptic nature of aphasia when a clear alternate etiology is unavailable, even when EEG fails to show a clear ictal pattern. We also present a brief discussion of previously reported ictal aphasias. (Source: Journal of the Neurological Sciences)