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: Toward a Pathophysiological Synthesis

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justina Ruksenaite ◽  
Anna Volkmer ◽  
Jessica Jiang ◽  
Jeremy CS Johnson ◽  
Charles R Marshall ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Care Management ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Disease Stage ◽  
Major Step ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Semantic Variant ◽  
Auditory Impairments

Abstract Purpose of Review The term primary progressive aphasia (PPA) refers to a diverse group of dementias that present with prominent and early problems with speech and language. They present considerable challenges to clinicians and researchers. Recent Findings Here, we review critical issues around diagnosis of the three major PPA variants (semantic variant PPA, nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA, logopenic variant PPA), as well as considering ‘fragmentary’ syndromes. We next consider issues around assessing disease stage, before discussing physiological phenotyping of proteinopathies across the PPA spectrum. We also review evidence for core central auditory impairments in PPA, outline critical challenges associated with treatment, discuss pathophysiological features of each major PPA variant, and conclude with thoughts on key challenges that remain to be addressed. Summary New findings elucidating the pathophysiology of PPA represent a major step forward in our understanding of these diseases, with implications for diagnosis, care, management, and therapies.

scholarly journals Breakdowns in Informativeness of Naturalistic Speech Production in Primary Progressive Aphasia

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Jeanne Gallée ◽  
Claire Cordella ◽  
Evelina Fedorenko ◽  
Daisy Hochberg ◽  
Alexandra Touroutoglou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Speech Analysis ◽  
Clinical Settings ◽  
Functional Communication ◽  
Or Efficiency ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Communication Impairment ◽  
Semantic Variant ◽  
Lower Production

“Functional communication” refers to an individual’s ability to communicate effectively in his or her everyday environment, and thus is a paramount skill to monitor and target therapeutically in people with aphasia. However, traditional controlled-paradigm assessments commonly used in both research and clinical settings often fail to adequately capture this ability. In the current study, facets of functional communication were measured from picture-elicited speech samples from 70 individuals with mild primary progressive aphasia (PPA), including the three variants, and 31 age-matched controls. Building upon methods recently used by Berube et al. (2019), we measured the informativeness of speech by quantifying the content of each patient’s description that was relevant to a picture relative to the total amount of speech they produced. Importantly, form-based errors, such as mispronunciations of words, unusual word choices, or grammatical mistakes are not penalized in this approach. We found that the relative informativeness, or efficiency, of speech was preserved in non-fluent variant PPA patients as compared with controls, whereas the logopenic and semantic variant PPA patients produced significantly less informative output. Furthermore, reduced informativeness in the semantic variant is attributable to a lower production of content units and a propensity for self-referential tangents, whereas for the logopenic variant, a lower production of content units and relatively ”empty” speech and false starts contribute to this reduction. These findings demonstrate that functional communication impairment does not uniformly affect all the PPA variants and highlight the utility of naturalistic speech analysis for measuring the breakdown of functional communication in PPA.

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 Dyslexic Characteristics of Chinese-Speaking Semantic Variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Kang Seng Ting ◽  
Heidi Foo ◽  
Pei Shi Chia ◽  
Shahul Hameed ◽  
Kok Pin Ng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Semantic Variant

scholarly journals Rapid rate on quasi-speech tasks in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia: A non-motor phenomenon?

2018 ◽  
Vol 144 (6) ◽  
pp. 3364-3370
Author(s):  
Rene L. Utianski ◽  
Hugo Botha ◽  
Joseph R. Duffy ◽  
Heather M. Clark ◽  
Peter R. Martin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Rapid Rate ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Semantic Variant

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

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