The Landau-Kleffner syndrome is an acquired condition in children consisting of aphasia and epileptic discharges in the EEG with or without clinical manifestation of epilepsy. We describe a case of a very young child whose neurologic and language development before onset of the illness was uniquely well documented. Apart from her aphasia she showed several other disturbances of higher cortical functions in the acute phase of the illness. No anatomical basis has been discovered for this disease till the present day. We discuss the possibility of an electrical dysregulation in several parts of the cortex as a pathophysiological basis for this syndrome.
Drachman DA, Leavitt J. Human memory and the cholinergic system. A relationship to ageing. Arch Neurol 1974;30:113-21. '6 Mishkin M. Memory in monkeys severely impaired by combined but not by separate removal of amygdala and hippocampus.
Dichotic listening performance was studied in 35 aphasic patients with unilateral brain lesions. Within this group, 30 patients exhibited an abnormal ear discrepancy: 20 patients showed a left-ear advantage (right-ear extinction), and 10 patients showed a right-ear advantage (left-ear extinction). All subjects were given a number of verbal tasks in order to evaluate several aspects of their linguistic abilities. For the left-ear advantage group, verbal scores were positively related to left-ear scores, but not to right-ear scores. For the right-ear advantage group, verbal scores were positively related to both left- and right-ear scores. The present results lend partial support for the prediction that right-ear extinction is associated with damage to the temporal lobe involving the geniculo-temporal system. No support was found for the prediction that left-ear extinction is associated with lesions placed in the deep structures of the parietal or parieto-occipital lobe involving the corpus callosum system. Our data indicate that the initial severity of brain injury is a critical factor in determining the direction of ear extinction, the lesions being larger in the left-ear advantage group. Results are discussed in relationship to other explanations of ipsilateral and contralateral extinction in aphasic patients.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.