Transition of Perspective on Aphasia and Todayʼs Topics

Abstract

  Perspective on aphasia has been changed due to various related fields: progress of diagnostic imaging methods, development of cognitive neuropsychology, advances of treatment of cerebrovascular diseases, and aging of patients. These backgrounds have changed us to understand aphasia from the classical classification of aphasia to more analytical point of view, for example elementary language symptom such as apraxia of speech, word finding difficulty, phonemic paraphasia and so on. Primary progressive aphasia ( PPA ) has showed us difference of symptoms depending on etiology of disease, and the diagnostic criteria has caused discussion for better examination for diagnosis of aphasia. A new type of examination: Mini Linguistic State Examination for PPA, in which the diagnosis could be made with error types is expected to be useful.