2012 Volume 32 Issue 3 Pages 393-404
Linguistic features of three Japanese-speaking patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) were reported. Each case met the up-dated international clinical criteria for three variants of PPA respectively. A case with both peri-sylvian fissures atrophies predominantly on the left side, diagnosed progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) on basis of marked difficulties in producing words and sentences by severe motor speech impairment with relatively spared word and sentence comprehension. The core feature of her motor speech impairment was characterized as anarthria. She also showed marked difficulty in kana writing. In a case with semantic dementia (SD) with focal atrophies on anterior temporal lobes marked on the left, severe anomia with word comprehension deficits was prominent with preserved sentence repetition. And surface dyslexia in kanji word reading was confirmed. These symptoms were essential for gogi-aphasia. The third case characterized fluent but sparse spontaneous speech caused by word finding difficulty and severely impaired sentence repetition diagnosed logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA) , the third variant of PPA. He produced phonological paraphasias with self-alteration in both speech and repetition. His linguistic features are similar to conduction aphasia though his sentence comprehension was worse than the other cases with PPA. Three main subtypes of PPA were compatible to the Japanese-speaking patients with PPA. However, subtyping of PPA would become more useful for the experts when it predict the classification of underlying illness or grouping of diseases, then the most suitable treatment or care for each subtype should be provided.
