Abstract
We reported a case of peculiar reiterative speech following encephalitis. The patient was a right-handed male who had been afflicted with encephalitis when he was 22 years old. When we examined him about 7 years later, he suffered consciousness-impairing seizures several times a day. He also showed apathy, unawareness of his deficits and a tendency toward dysinhibition. MRI revealed atrophy in the right fronto-temporo-parietal lobe and left temporal lobe, and enlarged lateral ventricles especially in the right hemisphere. In neuropsychological evaluation, he demonstrated aphasia and auditory agnosia (word deafness, sound agnosia and amusia) and reiterated his speech quite frequently. The characteristics of his reiterative speech were as follows : a) the most frequent repetition unit was one syllable, followed in descending order by single words and multi-syllables ; b) repetitions were frequent at the last and middle syllables of words, while less frequent at the first syllable. We suggested that his reiterative speech may be mostly closely associated with logoclonia, and that logoclonia is not a symptom manifested only in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
