Diagnosis and rehabilitation attempt of a patient with acquired dyslexia

Abstract

Although dyslexia is a common consequence of brain damage there are few studies about therehabilitation of this disorder. Cognitive Neuropsychology models of reading have been used to describe severalsyndromes of acquired dyslexia. Phonological dyslexia is a reading disorder characterized by a dysfunctionalgrapheme-to-phoneme conversion procedure, which affects the ability to read low frequency words and nonwords. Lexical reading is preserved and patients can read frequent words (regular and irregular).ObjectiveVerify the application of the cognitive model in the characterization of the reading disorder of a patient with acquired dyslexia and in the devising and implementation of a rehabilitation plan.MethodsThis study presents OCS, a 57-year-old patient who suffered from acquired phonological dyslexia after a left temporo-parietooccipital ischemic stroke. A rehabilitation program based on the principles of Cognitive Neuropsychology was devised non-words and low frequency words with controlled lengths were used and the patient was stimulated to read them aloud in a 22-session treatment.ResultsThe post-test evaluation showed quantitative and qualitative improvements Significant improvements were verified in the total number of correct responses including self-correction attempts (p<0.01) and in the reading of trisyllabic and polysyllabic non-words of simple syllabic structure (p=0.0007 and p=0.02 respectively).ConclusionsThe use of the cognitive model to devise a rehabilitation program was successful and we observed significant improvement of reading skills in a short period of treatment. The achievements over this period provided the patient with functional reading performance.

Identifying Acquired Dyslexia and Dysgraphia Patterns in Greek Patients After Traumatic and Non-Traumatic Brain Disorders

“…Instead, nonword reading and spelling accuracy and phonological awareness remained intact [33]. Of high importance is that although surface dyslexia is determined in English language by an impaired ability to read irregular words, with a relatively wellpreserved ability to read regular words and nonwords [34], a comparison between English and Greek language permits a contrast of morphological effects in addition to orthographic transparency.…”

“…In addition to semantic, phonological/sound, and orthographical patterns, an affected intermediate mental lexicon containing whole word forms, failed to map word entries in the orthographic lexicon. Hence, as it is shown through the correlations between spelling and phonological processing, due to the difficulties in reading, writing, spelling irregular words, the patients were forced to rely on nonlexical procedures, resulting to the regularization of these words [22,34,43].…”

Thalamic alexia with agraphia

“…Although Portuguese is a language considered regular, because it provides high frequency of grapheme-phoneme conversion governed by grammatical rules, there are irregularities, for a few particular graphemes, which allow the application of the dual route model for studies of dyslexia in patients speakers and readers of Portuguese. 36 , 37 …”

Acquired Dyslexia in Three Writing Systems: Study of a Portuguese-Japanese Bilingual Aphasic Patient

“…Although rare, studies of patients with acquired dyslexia in Portuguese tend to reflect the patterns of impaired lexical and nonlexical reading reported in other alphabetic scripts. Portuguese speaking patients with acquired phonological, deep, surface, semantic and literal dyslexia, are all reported [5,13,25,[37][38][39]41]. The characteristics of these types of acquired dyslexias closely resemble those described in English, French and Spanish readers.…”